The several simultanous programmes
collectively known as the Edinburgh Festival take over the Scottish
capital each August, bringing thousands of shows in around-the-clock
performances. No one can see more than a tiny fraction, but we managed
to review more than 150. Most of these shows went on tour after
Edinburgh, many eventually playing London.

We originally posted
these reviews on several pages, to save the reader excessive scrolling.
But for the archive we've condensed them all onto one page.

They're in alphabetical
order (solo performers by last name), so scroll down for what you want,
or just browse.

The ActorThe Roxy - Horton
Foote may be America's best semi-unknown playwright. For fifty years he
has been turning out nice little realistic plays, many about rural life
in the 1920s and 1930s, that have become staples of the amateur and
student repertoires without ever really making a mark in the
professional theatre. But this very characteristic play, about a Texas
lad's discovery that he wants to be an actor and his family and
community's disbelief, turns out to be not one of his best. From the
brief description I just gave, you could write the whole play, and
might well come up with more interesting interactions than he does. It
is not helped by a static production in which only the lead actor, Ben
Hynes, rises above the lowest levels of school acting. Gerald
Berkowitz

Adventures in a BathTheatre Workshop - From a feminist
perspective, a girl becoming a woman can be seen as a political act,
especially when there are the conflicting temptations of suicide,
psychosis and anorexia. But it is something of a stretch to equate the
process with the fight against the inequities and oppressions of the
Third World. And that is particularly true when the primary means for
expressing this in a play is statement rather than dramatisation, while
the onstage action focuses on the emotional conflicts within the young
woman. Ysabel Collyer's play puts two young women in adjoining
bathtubs, gradually letting us understand that they represent two
aspects of the same person, along with a third avatar played by a rag
doll. For the first part of the play their debate is about the whole
personıs inner conflict as she faces the experiences and burdens of
becoming a sexual being. But somehow the talk turns to broader social
issues, with the two actresses taking turns addressing us on Marxist
interpretations of world geopolitics in general and the Zapatista
movement in Mexico in particular. No part of this becomes theatrically
alive, despite some film projections, and none is effectively related
to the personal story, so the play sinks into an uninspiring classroom
lecture. Gerald Berkowitz

AgainGreyfriars
Kirk House - This brief
play by Lucy Traube touches on the lives of two brothers, one
of whom suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, forced to wash his
hands repeatedly and near-agoraphobic in his fear of contamination
outside. A string of brief scenes jumps among several time frames - the
relatively normal childhood of the brothers, the beginnings of the
disorder in adolescence, the depths of the obsession, and what appears
to be a period of recovery. The play is too short and disjointed in its
structure to offer any coherent characterisation or explanation of the
psychological process, the author's one insight that the boy's fear of
outside contamination may have begun as an excessive sense of his own
uncleanness tied to the adolescent discovery of masturbation. More of a
sketch for a play than the final product, the piece leaves too much
unexplored - for example, the role of the brother - and gives Nick
Waters and Matthew Cranfield too little to work with, so that they are
challenged by the basic tasks of keeping the time scheme clear and
finding their way around the small stage.. Gerald Berkowitz

The ArgumentAssembly Rooms
- Theatre O is a performance group whose style incorporates mime,
movement, exaggerated gesture and clowning to evoke an emotional
intensity beyond naturalism. Their current group-created show uses all
these tools in the dissection of a dysfunctional family. Mother died
while the children were young, and father seems unable to keep the
family together as every encounter, in their childhood and when they
are adults, is filled with unexpected tensions. Eventually we learn
that a lie at the centre of their relationships has kept them from
developing healthily, and its exposure near the end of the play may
have come too late for them. Undoubtedly inventive, with several
telling moments, as when a daughter's innocent questions about her
mother turn into a chilling formal interrogation. But the play's basic
structure of withholding a key piece of information until the end means
that for too long we cannot be sure what all this theatrical cleverness
is in aid of. Gerald Berkowitz

Baby JaneTraverse
Theatre
- Aka People Show 113, four performers take to the stage and, as out of
synch video screens fast-forward through the movie Whatever Happened to
Baby Jane?, in similar disjointed fashion the quartet simultaneously
describes what's going on. What seems a random, pointless act of
anarchy soon becomes a funny if unsettling act of anarchy that suddenly
makes sense. It's a taste of things to come. As the credits close, the
actors wheel out revolving mirror stands and tables with telephones to
create four dressing rooms. The phones ring with scenes to play from
the film and so begins a bizarre rehearsal that leads into the dark
side. One actress bows to pressure and lets her character consume her
while the other struggles to resist. The two men, reduced to a string
of supporting roles, are powerless to help yet rivalries grow within
the troupe as each minute the quibbles, spats and stresses accumulate.
The cast responds skilfully to such demanding roles where the hi-tech
element is as crucial as the human and music hall constantly bubbles
under the surface. In throwing every theatrical genre up in the air,
they have created a unique take on metatheatre taken to its extreme. Nick
Awde

Bill Bailey: Part TrollPleasance -
Okay, so Bill Bailey avoids the cutting edge and he can do no wrong in
front of his partisan audiences. But where most comics struggle to fill
an hour, Bailey struggles for the opposite reasons - he's bursting with
routines. And anyway the material is, well, immaterial since Bailey's
laidback personality alone touches the parts other comedians do not.
Tonight it's shaggy dog tales of sending subliminal messages as a
lounge lizard pianist at the Basingstoke Hilton, sending Rod Hull and
Emu on black ops into Cambodia, and the definition of "strict"
vegetarianism and its effect on Hitler. Keyboards, acoustic guitar,
Theremin and beatbox all get an outing too, expertly mixed and cued. No
Bailey show would be complete without a lecture on the songster's craft
and chart hits get the rundown this time. Craig David comes in for
especial criticism requiring the response of a "real" love song of
Sturm und Drang - a sort of Brell meets Scott Walker meets Slayer.
Consistently funny and even provocative, if only for the Portishead
reinterpretation of the National Anthem, Bailey is well worth the
ticket money. Oh, and the part troll bit? No idea, and he probably
doesn't know either. Nick Awde

Bill Shakespeare's Italian
JobGilded Balloon Teviot
- The movie that is such a British favourite that it's gone beyond cult
is combined with some very witty cut-and-paste Shakespeare quoting in a
comedy that ultimately runs out of steam but has a lot of fun before it
does. It really helps if you know the Michael Caine heist movie by
heart, in order to follow what passes for a plot and to get all the
in-jokes; and if you happen to know your Shakespeare extensively enough
to spot that virtually every line is filched from somewhere in the
Collected Works, all the better. Anyway, there are three Minis onstage,
and bits and pieces of Romeo & Juliet, The Merchant of Venice
and Twelfth Night woven into the story, and the cleverness keeps the
thing afloat for at least two-thirds of its length. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Birds of SarajevoThe Roxy - Unless the door
opens in the middle of the stage, any show whose director absolutely
forbids admittance of latecomers is missing the whole point of the
Fringe and gets docked four stars automatically. When such amateurish
preciousness is compounded by making the audience wait 20 minutes under
the same prohibitory sign, it incurs the loss of the remaining star. So
Birds needs to be good to work its way up from nul points. And,
irritatingly enough, it is. Damn good, in fact. Hailing from Yugoslavia
and France, Florence le Juez and Harris Burina enact the transformation
of a young Christian-Muslim couple's domestic idyll to nightmare prison
as war rages outside. Not a word is spoken save for anguishedd cries
when the creeping tension needs real release. Instead, a soundtrack of
folk melodies and birdsong follows the exquisitely choreographed
action. Le Juez is all joy and innocence, cradling her soon-to-be born
child as she dances, snuggling up to her postman husband. As the man
who loves her, Burina evokes the gentle strength of the wager-earner
who ensures she gets all the munchies she craves. Such perfection
cannot last and so, when the celebratory gunfire outside turns to
conflict, the end of innocence begins and their undying love cannot
prevent the ensuing madness that splits their lives. Nick
Awde

Boy Steals TrainAssembly Rooms
- Most boys (and girls, admit it!) dream of driving their own train,
hooting whistles, announcing stations. Precocious teenager Darius
McCollum decided he'd actually follow up on those urges. As a result
he's spent years in jail in his native New York for illicitly driving
subway trains. Courtesy of NYC's 78th Street Theatre Lab, Paperhat has
created a high-octane zoom through the bizarre but true life of this
possibly autistic trainspotter who irreversibly crossed the line. As an
obsessed kid he played truant to hang out with the subway drivers,
getting so good they'd let him take their shifts whenever they felt
like skiving for a Knicks game or a bit on the side. Darius' subsequent
arrests made him something of a celebrity in the process. Ron Simons
charms as Darius, capturing the vulnerability of a hapless perp of
victimless crimes, while Misty De Berry shines as his longsuffering
mother. The rest of this buzzing ensemble fills in a gallery of MTA
drivers and cleaners, judges and lawyers, plus the subculture of
buskers, trainspotters and lowlifes whose hearts beat to the rhythms of
the subway. It's criminal to laugh and cry this much at one man's
misfortune, but you can't help it. Nick Awde

Breaking StrainC Venue -
Justin Butcher's modern version of the Phaedra myth is clever and
inventive, hampered only by an uncertainty about just how seriously he
wants the play to be taken. It opens with a comic prologue reminding us
of the story of the stepmother whose love for her stepson led to
tragedy, and the opening scenes of the play proper continue the comic
tone. Katy Feeney plays the new wife of a Greek millionaire as a
slightly dumpy middle-aged woman whose sudden lust for the man's
athlete son is ridiculous even to her, while the author plays the boy
as such an uptight prig that he can't be taken seriously. But then
things suddenly get very serious, as he tries to use her lust to
discredit her and she takes an extreme and very unlikely revenge. There
are both a serious play and a satire jumbled together in this script,
and if the author could separate them he might have two excellent plays
on his hands. Gerald Berkowitz

Bright Colours OnlyPleasance (reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - Pauline Goldsmith's
meditation on death, dying and bereavement looks at it all with a
tenderly amused eye, domesticating the subject without disrespecting
it, and paradoxically creating one of the happiest and most emotionally
satisfying hours on the fringe. Goldsmith begins in the persona of a
frighteningly perky undertaker, welcoming us into her parlour and
proudly displaying the tacky but oh-so-tasteful-looking accoutrements
on offer, such as the gold-effect plastic handles which, she warns us,
should not actually be used to lift the coffin. She follows with a
realistic and benevolent mix of warts-and-all memories of the departed
- a spinster aunt, a grumpy grandmother - and the incongruous behaviour
of the living - watching television at a wake, or babbling
hysterically. Projections of computer-generated animations,
particularly effective in their simplicity, accompany key sequences.
Goldsmith's performance in this self-written and self-directed piece is
beautifully controlled, moving seamlessly from one persona to another
and from the gently comic to the touchingly evocative, such as the
catalogue of a child's first experiences of death or the departed's
realisation of the life not yet lived. And the piece ends with a
fourth-wall-breaking coup de theatre that is as unexpectedly moving as
it is audacious. Gerald Berkowitz

Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola
Tesla C Venue -
We take electricity for granted yet without it the modern world
wouldn't exist - and so we should thank the Yugoslavian inventor,
visionary and madman Nikola Tesla. Here, artfully realised via every
trick in the performer's handbook, snapshots of his life and career
chart his decline from whizzkid to Howard Hughes-like isolation.
Jonathon Young is a suitably Balkan and intense Tesla who emigrates to
the US to work with inventor-industrialist Thomas Edison, a barmy but
wily David Hudgins. Money rows lead to Tesla setting up on his own and
predictable rivalry between the electro-titans. Always on the look-out
for their brilliant friend's wellbeing are members of New York's hoi
poloi: caring and brilliant Katherine Underwood-Johnson (Kim Collier)
and her clever journalist husband Robert (Kevin Kerr). But his unique
brain couldn't unlock his bad head for business and he died paranoid
and lonely in 1943, destroyed by his quest for the Holy Grail of free
energy for all. This Canadian company performs with an innovation of
which Tesla would have been proud to produce great narrative with
touches of humour and charming physicality that includes human-sized
pigeons, a giant ball and slides. Oh, a re-creation of Edison's
notorious public electrocution of a kitten. Nick Awde

Cambridge Footlights:
Non-Sexual Kissing Pleasance Dome
- You can always learn something about the entertainment zeitgeist from
the annual Cambridge and Oxford revues. For a while every witty
undergraduate clearly wanted to become a Python; then they were all
aiming at BBC writing careers; then for a while they all had stand-up
comic aspirations. Judging by this latest Footlights, they now want to
be Alan Ayckbourn when they grow up. The current show eschews erudition
or absurdity in favour of the bittersweet, comedy with a hint of
insight into middle class life. So we get a guy unable to process the
news that his girl has dumped him, a mixed group awaiting the guest at
a surprise party and exposing their emptiness in the process, two guys
who bond more fully in a chance meeting in a lift than either does with
his girlfriend, and so on. There are some laughs, but the clear goal is
something slightly deeper, and they do at least sometimes pull it off. Gerald
Berkowitz

Chicken - The True Story of
a Teenage Gigolo in HollywoodAssembly Rooms
- Servicing middle-aged women at their homes at 100 bucks a trick,
polishing silver in nothing but a black lace pinny, discovering tantric
sex with a dippy hippy ­ just how does a nice American middle-class
teenager become a freelance industrial sex technician, the chicken of
the title? David Henry Sterry helps explain this via this frank, funny,
surreal romp through his own experiences as a youthful hooker. More
Personal Services than Valley of the Dolls, he describes his precocious
younger incarnation chancing upon the seedy underbelly of the LA sex
industry. After meeting charismatic pimp Sonny, it's a rumpy-pumpy
joyride from there on as he moves up the sex ladder via straight sex to
orgies and the arcane levels of fetishism. Most bizarre of all is when
he tries to go on a normal date. Sterry resists overglamorising his
exploits and never lets the laughs get in the way of the story.
Skipping the STDs, exploitation and street slang allows him to keep the
appeal universal and he considerately withdraws just before things too
explicit. And though the stylised gestures that punctuate the delivery
are a little irritating, his storytelling technique always engages and
never lets the attention droop. Nick Awde

The Child-Killer: A
Portrait of a PaedophilePleasance Dome
- This is a significant play. Translated by Paul Moor, Oliver Reese's
work assembles direct excerpts from the correspondence of Jurgen
Bartsch, a German jailed in the sixties for the killing of four
children. Dramatising material straight out from this murderer's mind
runs the risk of diluting the message and glamorising a man whose
actions are beyond revulsion. Here you find Bartsch's words without
embellishment, their intensity given perspective through the device of
representing him with two actors. Any Jeckyll and Hyde scenario,
however, is strictly resisted. Here is a child killer who started
killing when he was barely a teenager. Good and evil may or may not
have relevance for this paedophile, yet no moral judgment is imposed
since by the end Bartsch has provided more than enough to judge
himself. Daniel Goldman is compelling from the onset, homing in on the
complexities of Bartsch's voice as he tries to disguise his wheedling
under matter-of-fact postulating. Archie Young takes time to warm up,
but his starker, more calculating persona soon kicks in with a chilling
vengeance. Rarely acknowledging each other's presence, the creepy
connection between the two is tangible and electric thanks to Hazel
Pearson's direction which refuses to let the attention falter for an
instant. Nick Awde

Julian Clary - Natural Born Mincer: St Georgeıs West
- Clearly designed for those who find the sight of him in glitzy drag
and a string of single-entendre gags inherently funny, Julian Clary's
current tour show is made up of half-developed bits and pieces that
sometimes look like leftovers and rejects from past scripts. Clary is
at his best in the opening stand-up sequence built on audience
interaction, delivering the insults and bawdy invitations his fans
expect. A history of homosexuality through the ages is dropped after
one weak skit, in favour of a more extended sequence in which two
straight men are recruited from the audience to play a love scene with
him. A final stand-up bit stretches a particularly unfunny scatological
story beyond its limits. Clary has three or four changes of costume,
each appropriately outrageous in a sub-Danny LaRue way, speak-sings his
way through a couple of songs, and makes strikingly little use of his
second bananas, in a show that seems designed to deliver the very least
that he can get away with. Gerald Berkowitz

The Complete Ring of the
Nibelung (abridged) St. Cut's - Well, if it worked
for Shakespeare... Pitching his tent somewhere between the Reduced
Shakespeare Company and Gerard Hoffnung, Hugh Janes and his cast do to
Wagner what should be done to Wagner. Two performers and an
occasionally speaking pianist manage to tell us most of the story of
the operas and manage to get much of it right, despite their conviction
that The Valkyrie is actually set in Scotland and Siegfried should be
sung in a country and western mode. Obviously we are in the realm of
broad parody and no opportunity for cocking a snook is overlooked.
Michele Moran's Brunnhilde, clearly having seen Apocalypse Now, insists
that her big number should be accompanied by helicopters. The battle
between Siegmund and Hunding takes place at the Highland Games, with
David Plimmer playing both roles. And the audience is repeatedly
involved in the action in panto style, helping to form the rainbow
bridge, singing along with the valkyries, and ­ don't ask me why ­ line
dancing in their pews. Some of this has been done before, in sketch
shows and the like, but throwing all these comic and satiric devices
into one show, with the comic butt that everyone is ready to see
skewered, makes for a thoroughly satisfying entertainment.
Gerald Berkowitz

Confessions of a Justified
Sinner Netherbow
- James Hogg's 1824 attack on the excesses and hypocrisies of Scottish
Presbyterianism has been turned into an intense two-hander by John
Carnegie, who also directs. Matthew Burgess plays a young man so
convinced that he is among the Elect and thus guaranteed salvation for
his religiosity that he is easy prey for the devil-like figure played
by Alan Steele, who lures him into a variety of sins under the guise of
doing God's work. Steele has the flashier role, doubling as a
fire-and-brimstone preacher and others. But it is Burgess whose
tightly-wound portrayal of the zealot creates and sustains an almost
unbearable reality to this twist on the Faust story. Gerald
Berkowitz

Cradle KingJohn Knox's House
- James VI and I is found in his old age in this pleasant little solo
show, remembering, as old men will, both the triumphs and the griefs of
his life. But author David Coulter adds a nice touch by remembering
that James was also patron of Shakespeare's theatre company, so that
the king's memories are filtered through the plots and words of
Shakespeare's plays. James's relations with his sons became a male
counterpart to King Lear, while his continued bitterness at the murder
of his father is shown by casting his mother as both Lady Macbeth and
Gertrude. Playing in a small (and authentically Jacobean)
room to audiences usually numbered in the single digits, Robin Thomson
makes the man come alive in an understated and attractive
performance. Gerald Berkowitz

Cyril's Little Moments of
Weakness and Strength Pleasance
- Julian Garner's sadly comic look at the life of an aging carer is
given a sensitive production by C.H.A.O.S. Theatre, as Jeffrey Mayhew
plays a sixty-something man who has lovingly and uncomplainingly
devoted himself to the care of his blind and wheelchair-bound brother
(David Williams), who has, in the unmalicious way of some invalids,
become ever more demanding in small and large ways. A chance meeting
with a local widow (Janie Booth) hints at an opening up of Cyril's
little world, and the play looks at that possibility. Under Mayhew's
direction, the actors underplay nicely, keeping the story on a small
scale with, for example, Cyril's frustrations just hinted at by small
gestures of anger he can safely make in the knowledge his brother won't
see them. It is little touches like that, and like the realistic
awkwardness of two older people not used to making new friends, that
stick in the mind and make for a warm and moving hour. Gerald
Berkowitz

The DamageGilded Balloon Caves
- Paul Sellar has written two short monologues in the Conor McPherson
mode, shaggy dog tales with a black comic tone, in this case both about
sport. In Killer a son describes his father's one opportunity of making
something of his life as a darts player, how he was thwarted and how
the son waited decades for his chance of revenge. In The Stake a
suddenly-called-in loan shark debt forces a man to stake all on a horse
race that goes bad, leading to gunshots, a Wild West-style getaway and
the surprise discovery of who was really behind it all. Both monologues
have built-in strengths, in the hardman atmosphere, the suspenseful
accounts of the darts showdowns and the horserace, and the
black comic elements. Unfortunately Andrew Dickens' flat delivery has
neither rhythm, humour, audience engagement nor even much variation in
inflection, volume or tempo, and thus makes far too little of these
opportunities. Gerald Berkowitz

Dark EarthTraverse
- Like any theatre company, Edinburgh's Traverse does a variety of
work. But there is a particular sort of realistic drama, frequently
with a Scottish flavour, that I always think of as the typical Traverse
play. This year's version is David Harrower's study in localised
culture clash and loss of a past that still has a hold. When a young
Glasgow couple's car breaks down somewhere in mid-Scotland, they are
taken in by a farm family. Inevitably, life styles clash, truths are
told, and both sides are severely shaken by the encounter. The locals,
immersed in the land and in the area's history, are faced with losing
both; the city mice realise that their freedom and affluence mask an
emotional rootlessness. The play breaks no new ground and ultimately
tells us little we don't know, but it does its job solidly and lingers
in the mind longer than most - the very definition of a Traverse play. Gerald
Berkowitz

Dean's Silly Song Sing-AlongAssembly Rooms
- A historic show for two reasons - it's Dean Friedman's first
appearance at the Fringe (he's also doing Songs For Adults at 6.35pm at
the same venue) and he's part of the Assembly Rooms' first children's
programme. Better known as the man responsible for 70s hits like Lucky
Stars, Ariel and Woman Of Mine, Dean is also an accomplished kids
entertainer with a raft of infectiously funny songs for every
eventuality. Suitable for under-10s, you'll instantly find yourself
jigging along to catchy ditties about bees, elder brothers and smelly
feet. And, of course, there's the Silly Silly Silly Silly Silly Song
which is gloriously, um, silly. Participation is high on the agenda as
every song has a hook for everyone to join in, plus there's lots of
silly costumes for the younger members to dress up in when they're
invited onstage to be Dean's backing group. A must-see for all the
family. Nick Awde

Death in the ChapelSt. Cut's
- An amiable comic whodunit with an opportunity for the audience to
play along by trying to guess the who, how and why, this modest
two-hander is a vehicle for two personable performers. In the guise of
dim detective and dimmer assistant, they take us back to 1930 and the
wedding of Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan where, they would have us
believe, one of the guests was murdered. Whodunit? The dodgy
archaeologist who once got lost looking for the Lost City? The society
dowager with a weakness for Mae West one-liners? The malevolent media
millionaire, the mousy secretary or the flapper floozie? Or perhaps the
butler did it? Playing all the roles, with the most minimal of costume
and voice changes, the two actors keep things moving swiftly while
carefully dropping both clues and red herrings until they stop the
action to let us record our deductions before they solve the case. A
slight piece, but thoroughly entertaining. Gerald Berkowitz

DescentAssembly Rooms
- Elizabeth Hess is a New York-based writer-actress who was raised in
an emotionally repressed and repressive Canadian Mennonite family, and
wrote a previous solo play about the ways in which that experience
affected her. She returns to the same material in this new piece, but
with a different self-awareness and perspective. While recounting many
of the same emotional and psychological crimes against her and other
relatives of her generation, she comes to realise this time that her
parents' generation did not set out to harm her but were merely
responding to the way they had been raised, which was in turn a
response to what the previous generation knew, and so on, so that this
play ends on a note of understanding and the possibility of
reconciliation. Despite - or perhaps because of - her unique intimacy
with the material, Hess may not be the best actress to perform it,
since her emotional excesses, writhing about the floor and the like,
come across more like bad acting school exercises than dramatic
truth. Gerald Berkowitz

Dr. Bunhead's Bananas of DoomGeorge Square Theatre
- By way of introduction, Dr Bunhead gravely announces he has caught
wind of a dastardly plot to dominate the world. Its architect is the
evil Banana who has converted Banana Fart Gas to a new superformula
most deadly to humankind. And so begins a wonderfully loopy race
against time to thwart the Banana's plan, 007-style. And, of course,
this is the perfect excuse for 60 minutes of Dr Bunhead's trademark
non-stop explosive mayhem. Within seconds of starting the doctor
already has an unsuspecting parent up onstage and the kids are shouting
instructions even before the lights have gone down. The hunt for the
deadly BFG leaves a trail littered with the debris of one pyromanical
experiment after another. The three-cup routine gets improbable
mileage, the infamous potato cannon makes a return while there are
thrills and spills with liquid nitrogen. Oh yes, and still up there as
crowd favorite is the amazing exploding water bottle. Though the
material is a tad stretched compared to previous years, this remains
one of the most consistently inventive and entertaining acts on the
circuit courtesy of Tom Pringle. Fun, farts and suspense, life's always
a gas with Dr Bunhead. Nick Awde

Duck Traverse
- Her boyfriend calls her that because of her big feet, which nicely
encapsulates his mix of real fondness and unconsciously blokish
cruelty, and neither her parents nor those of her best friend have any
awareness of the difficulties of growing up, so one understands why the
teenager played by Ruth Negga is drawn into an affair with a seemingly
more sensitive older man. But inevitably he fails her, too, and Duck
faces the challenge of moving forward on her own. A typical
coming-of-age play, then, with author Stella Feehily adding two
original twists - the central figure's gender and the fact that it is
her friend, to whom much less happens, who actually moves on. The
company Out Of Joint and director Max Stafford-Clark make the most of
the material, though without ever really transcending the familiarity
of the genre. Gerald Berkowitz

Dulcas's WomanPleasance - The pretence of a
salute to Emile Dulcas, a mythical author and filmmaker, is the frame
for a programme of ten brief one-woman sketches supposedly from his
work. That premise proves an unnecessary and distracting baggage that
weighs down a piece whose real strength lies in the sketches
themselves, the best of which belie a comic opening with a fuller
emotional resonance or a sting in the tail. A grieving widow guides us
to the understanding of how the burden of her husband's extended
illness made his death a relief. A teenage girl's one perfect day is
remembered by her adult self with a full appreciation of its
uniqueness. A groom's rejected girlfriend realises at his wedding that
she had completely misunderstood him, herself and the bride, and
accepts the redefinitions with a grace that surprises even her.
Genevieve Swallow performs the varied sketches with admirable
versatility and sensitivity to both the comic and serious colours of
each piece, and repeatedly creates an instant reality other actresses
might have trouble achieving in a full-length play. Gerald
Berkowitz

EgoPleasance -
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist fast approaches his 50th birthday and
is suffering a crisis of self-confidence. What can another book,
another prize tell Steven Marks (Stephen Crossley) about himself? From
the couch he wonders, as his analyst (Jeff Harding) takes notes, might
he ever enter the posthumous literary canon? A massive dose of
narcissism is diagnosed. As Marks leaves, he hints he may not return
for his next session. He turns out to be right since he goes missing
after a boating accident and is believed dead. Miriam (Tara Hugo), his
ex-wife and a successful "edible artist", soon esconces herself on the
same shrink's couch, plagued by guilty curiosity over his abrupt
demise. A twist in the plot arrives shortly after and sets in motion a
whole new take on posthumous celebrity. Carl Djerassi is not an
exceptional writer but he has created promising situations with
farcical undertones. Yet director Andy Jordan misses most of his
chances and, more crucially, wastes an experienced cast. Badly paced,
the piece goes wide of the agenda and so each protagonist lacks depth.
A little of the barbed commentary on the excesses of fame does come
across, however, and there are a few deserved laughs along the way. Nick
Awde

Eros of Love and DistructionThe Garage
- The Indo-Japanese choreographer and dancer Shakti addresses the
journey of woman in search of fulfilment in this one-hour dance,
showing a series of false starts in religion, love and the like before
ending in a triumph of the spirit. Recurring images in the dance are of
beauty turning into a trap or perversion of itself. An Indian bridal
gown is stripped away to reveal a tawdry strip-show costume; a flowing
scarf becomes a prisoner's yoke; a whirling dance of religious ecstasy
leaves her hobbled by the skirt wrapped around her feet. As always,
Shakti borrows freely from various Asian and western dance
vocabularies, moving eclectically between the beautiful and the banal,
happily running the risks involved in both extremes as, for example,
her final dance of fulfilment resembles a Hollywood version of an
all-purpose pagan dance, the sort of thing Debra Paget would have
danced in a 1950s costume epic. Gerald Berkowitz

Fascinating Aida - One Last
FlutterAssembly Rooms
- The much-loved comedy-in-music trio are putting away their sequins
after this twentieth anniversary farewell tour, they insist, so those
who don't know them should grab the opportunity. The songwriting team
of Dillie Keane (the ditzy blonde one) and Adele Anderson (the tall
elegant one), along with Marilyn Couts (the operatic one), offer a new
batch of Tom Lehrer-ish songs that are as delightful as the old
favourites. The ladies all admit to being vaguely in the vicinity of
50, and so there are hilarious songs about face lifts and hot flashes,
along with one about the horrors of touring with the colleagues from
hell and one about the unexpected temptation of retiring to New
Zealand. It's sad to think this may be our last chance to hear
throwaway allusions to Camilla Park-and-ride or the FA anthem Sew on a
Sequin, so just go. You'll thank me. Gerald Berkowitz

The Father, The Son and
Holy MosesGateway Theatre
- A flat in Finland, it's winter, the heating's turned up and the
obsessive father and son who share the residence zip in and out in true
farce fashion, inviting all manner of mayhem. It's not only the humans
that have a slight tendency to dysfunction but also most of the
furnishings and fittings. Shoes stick to the floor as dad enters, door
handles fall off as whizzkid son exits, both have an unnerving tendency
to disappear into the heating vent or fridge. Mostly silent and with
shades of Monsieur Hulot and Mr Bean, this is classic Finnish comedy
where tragedy always seems to be heartbeat away, a world-weariness
exquisitively mapped out in Martti Suosalo's deadpan features as he
doubles the roles of father and son. As if playing a cinema Wurlitzer,
Iiro Rantala ­ the neighbour whose jazzed-up etudes are constantly
interrupted by the phone ­ provides a virtuoso soundtrack on baby
grand. Beautifully written and directed by Raila Leppakoski, the energy
ebbs somewhat in the final act as pathos replaces humour when the
father comes to terms with a flat that isn't half as fun without the
son who has finally left the nest for a glittering career abroad. A
low-key ending for a high energy masterpiece. Nick Awde

Tim FitzHighamPleasance Dome
- Inventive comic Tim FitzHigham was talked into a stunt for Comic
Relief this year, rowing down the Thames in a kayak made out of paper,
and this low-key show is his account of the adventure. Some may have
already spotted that doing something weird and making a show about it
is Dave Gorman's forte, and indeed FitzHigham doesn't really escape
that comparison, even borrowing some of Gorman's gimmicks, like a
number-of-capsizes-per-mile chart. His most successful variations on
the format involve brief sketches in which he plays some of the people
he met along the way, and particularly when he invokes the ghost of
eighteenth-century poet John Taylor, the first to attempt the stunt,
and when he involves the audience in a recreation of his wandering into
the middle of an Oxford boat race. Low-keyed, more chuckle than
laugh-inducing and perhaps a bit too much of a wander into Gorman
territory. Gerald Berkowitz

Flamingo Flamingo FlamingoRoman Eagle Lodge
- This delightful small-scale comedy is very much in the spirit of the
fringe in its inventiveness, exuberance and ability not to take itself
too seriously. Adam Brown and Clare Plested play a loving couple on
their wedding day, but with everything gone as wrong as it possibly
could, and flash back to trace the conflicting expectations, the
difficulties in meeting the mounting costs, and the discoveries of dark
secrets, to understand how they came to this impasse. The road is a
highly comic one, made even funnier by a series of self-referential
fourth-wall-breaking jokes that signal the audience to enjoy the
absurdity. A recorded narration by Barry Wilsher interrupts things in
mid-plot to introduce the actors, scenes are played and then rejected
to start over again, a running gag built on sound effects escalates
exponentially with each appearance, and backstage mutterings call our
attention to the difficulties of quick costume changes. The two onstage
performers have the grace and confidence to allow themselves to look
silly from time to time, in the service of the comedy, and their
obvious enjoyment is infectious. So a script that is satisfactorily
comic on its own is enhanced and enriched by a clever and
high-spirited production. Gerald Berkowitz

Flora The Red MenaceOld St Paul's
- The first theatrical collaboration of John Kander and Fred Ebb 40
years ago was this charming little Off-Broadway musical that also
introduced the young Liza Minnelli, which makes this revival by JRAFF
Productions doubly welcome, as a bit of history as well as for its own
merits. The Depression-era tale follows an unquenchably perky young
fashion designer as love for a labour organiser lures her briefly into
the Communist Party, only to have her native good heart and
good sense rebel against Party orthodoxy. Very attractive performances
by Sarah Lane and the rest of the young cast make the most of
the play, though they can't disguise the fact that Kander and Ebb
hadn't really found their voices yet, with only a couple of quiet songs
- You are You and A Quiet Thing - really registering. Gerald
Berkowitz

FootersAssembly Rooms
- Deep in the Zambian bush a conversation between an itinerant teacher
and the trees surrounding him is disturbed by a ruffian on the lookout
for easy pickings. There's no money to rob but the would-be thief Yoyo
hangs around, intrigued by the Zedy's musings on life, the universe and
everything - oh, and his savings book. And so begins an unlikely
pairing as they travel on together, pitting street savviness against
rural idealism. Yoyo convinces Zedy that he's in deep financial
trouble, and so the duo go to the big city. There among the police,
streetgirls and hustlers they set up the Church of Happy Healing to
sell Zedy's medicinal potions. There's a pleasing energy and violence
about this energetic two-hander that Becket would be proud of. Benne
Banda makes Yoyo a scheming rogue but all the more lovable for it,
while Augustine Lungu ensures that Zedy, for all his wide-eyed ways, is
no dupe. Like all picaresques, it meanders somewhat and at times the
allegory gets a tad preachy for British sensibilities but Banda and
Lungu keep the energy flowing while Shay Linehan's constant wordplay
and absurdist situations neatly showcases the duo as comsummate comics.
Nick Awde

Forgiveness DayAssembly Rooms
- The Assembly continues its unique collaboration with the Caucasus
through this one-woman play from Georgia's Marjanishvili Theatre.
Performed in Georgian and set in the present, a grandmother returns to
her village to sell the family home. She wants the cash so she can join
her daughter in Australia and the grandchildren she has never seen, but
as she discovers she'll get no more than a "groshi" (penny) for the
property, the ghosts of its memories come to life and her thoughts turn
inwardly to the father and Spanish mother she never really knew -
killed in the gulags - and the uncle and aunt who raised her.
Sweetening her uncertain past are the music and dance that inspired her
and gave her clues to her real identity. It's a story many Georgians
can relate to and has resonances for the rest of us, overcoming any
language barrier. But while Guranda Gabunia's performance is
technically sound and Keti Dolidze's direction makes good use of space,
together they fail to bring the emotional depth needed to flesh out
Inga Garuchava and Peter Khotianovksy's intriguing script. Nick
Awde

Fraulein ElseC Venue - Amy de Lucia's
adaptation of Schnitzler's novella follows a playful 17 year old girl
as she is forcefully thrust into the world of adult responsibility and
sexuality and ultimately destroyed by her inability to cope with it. As
both adaptor and actress de Lucia is particularly successful in the
earlier section, capturing the sometimes paradoxical mix that is
innocent adolescence, as she bounces between lightheartedness, blind
self-absorption and sentimental fantasy. When a family crisis puts her
into the power of an odious dirty old man, she finds the prospect of
being sexually exploited both horrifying and alluring, and Schnitzler
leaves ambiguous which of those sensations is the more horrifying. This
part of the story, with its rapid mood swings and ambiguous psychology,
offers the greatest challenge to the actress and director Eve Collyer,
and both have difficulty sustaining the reality through the
melodramatic emoting and events. Gerald Berkowitz

Dean Friedman - Songs for
Grown-upsAssembly Rooms
- The New York singer-songwriter who gave us silky hits like Lucky
Stars and Ariel in the otherwise mad, bad 70s and championed today by
our very own Gaby Roslin and Jonathan Ross, Dean Friedman's in town for
the first time with an umissable solo show. Dean's never really gone
away - he's just been busy producing a string of albums over the years
of precision-crafted songs in his own inimitable style. His first chart
smashes aside, every song in this Edinburgh show is a classic in its
own right - intimate, epic, satirical or just plain loving, there's a
song for everyone. He'll have you wiping away tears of laughter to the
cheerful insanity of Sado-Masochism, touch you with a ballad about a
loved one's death, and arouse delicious disgust with his homage to
self-pleasurement, Nookie In The Mail. Shopping Bag Ladies covers more
sober territory - a winsome observation of life on the streets - as
does McDonald's Girl, in the sense that this love letter to the burger
girl behind the counter got Dean banned by the BBC (putting him up
there with the Sex Pistols!). Dean refuses to be classified (he's also
doing Dean's Silly Song Sing-Along at 11am at the same venue) but under
the deceptively catchy melodies lies one of the industry's most
underrated lyricists. If only for the audience duet on Lucky Stars, you
won't see a better show. Nick Awde

GobPleasance Dome
- The nation needs a wake-up call, or at least that's what The
Liberator (Mark Rose) is trying to convince his mate, the drug-addled
Hard Man Les (Tom Hayes) as they stumble from yet another club. 'Wake
up London!' urges The Liberator ­ the capital must fall with the hordes
at its gates, armed not with bullets but the power of 'heathen
tongues', i.e. their gobs. If Citizen Smith's Wolfie took acid or
Little Malcolm and his Eunuchs got out a bit more often things might be
very different now. Jim Kenworth's promising Swiftian satire turns into
a bit of a Brechtian ramble as our unlikely duo dodge Parliament and
aim for the South Bank instead where, Stop the City style, they rally
the lost tribes of London, riding trashed supermarket trolleys like Don
Quixote, bollard loudhailers and Tennants Extra in hand. Pleasing
anarchy ensues as the pair meet their match at the Royal Festival Hall
in the shape of a couple of posh superpoets handily performing that
night and a battle of the alter-egos ensues. Director Lee Macintosh
Jones pushes Rose and Hayes into darkly, madly, funny performances,
while DJ Spike supplies enough beats, scratches, fanfares and SFX to
create a whole comic script in itself. Nick Awde

Dave Gorman's Googlewhack
AdventureGeorge Square Theatre - Dave Gorman does
weird things and then creates shows about them. A couple of years ago
he scoured the world for other people named Dave Gorman. This year he
discovered Googlewhacks, the game of putting two unrelated words into
an internet search engine in the hope of finding only one site
containing both. Characteristically, Dave took the game further,
travelling to meet people whose websites uniquely contained the words
unicyclist and periscopes, for example, and then getting them to find
another Googlewhack for him to track down. What saves this from total
trainspotting insanity is the fact that Dave is a really great
storyteller. He's aware of how mad the game is, and comically
recounts his attempts to resist a quest that came to take on a life of
its own. He skilfully characterises the people he meets in his
obsessive journey, from the Australians unhappily stranded in
Washington DC to the octogenarian creationist in (of course) southern
California, all with an infectious delight. And he carries the audience
through the highs and lows of his absurd adventure, inspiring cheers,
gasps and virtually continuous laughter. Gerald Berkowitz

The Gospel of Matthew C Venue
- As an actor, George Dillon is openly an acolyte of Steven Berkoff, so
much so that he threatens to become the theatrical equivalent of an
Elvis impersonator, submerging any personal style he may have into a
slavish imitation of Berkoff's mode of gesture, grimace and vocal
inflection (essentially a very broad, almost silent-film-type mugging,
which Berkoff can sometimes make very powerful and effective). Here he
applies the imitation to a playing of Matthew's version of the life and
ministry of Jesus but, except for an undeniable intensity he brings to
the telling, he does little to illuminate character or text. His Jesus
is something of a hard man - 'Oi! Follow me!' he shouts to the
fishermen - but no real characterisation is built on that voice. It's
just one of the two voices Dillon can do, and everyone else in the
story shares the other one. There's a lot of what looks like acting
going on, but it's all sound and fury. Gerald
Berkowitz

GreedPleasance (reviewed
in London) - The Clod Ensemble's
staged silent film draws its nominal inspiration from von Stroheim's
epic film of Norris's McTeague, though the connection amounts to little
more than having a dentist as protagonist and performing in silent film
mode, complete with broad mime, mugging and pauses for projected
intertitles. A more direct debt, at least in the first half, is to
classic silent comedians, as Lloyd, Chaplin and particularly Keaton are
repeatedly alluded to. In this group-developed piece dramatised by John
Binias and Suzy Willson, the shy dentist befriends and
marries a poor girl, and then discovers a miracle tooth-whitening
formula that makes them rich. The mode then shifts away from romantic
comedy as demon drink, war, rats and tooth decay conspire to destroy
their happiness and lead to a melodramatic ending. Jason Thorpe has the
showier role, and makes the most of set pieces like a hat-modelling
routine that directly quotes Keaton to comic effect, and a sequence
condensing all the discomforts and horrors of war into three minutes.
Sarah Cameron has the more prosaic job of carrying much of the plot,
with less opportunity to shine.. The basic joke of acting in silent
film style onstage wears thin even at an hour's running time, a case,
perhaps, of a natural two-reeler unwisely extended to feature length.
Gerald Berkowitz

GutsTheatre Workshop
- Connor is a schoolby growing up friendless with a lush of a mother
who loves him but ignores him, pushing him to find solace with his
grandmother. He's hiding a remarkable talent for writing poetry, a
talent his gay English teacher Jez wants to reveal to the world but his
good intentions soon turn to an obsession that threatens his
relationship with live-in lover Mark. You know everyone's doomed but
that doesn't mean they're going down without a fight. Sort of The
L-Shaped Room meets Teachers meets anything by Jimmy McGovern, Karlton
Parris' slice of Mancunian life is simply packed with characters and
ideas. Ths script shows its film origins via episodic set scenes with
neat punchlines, making for snappy plotting and instant
characterisation, compounded by an awesome ear for language. A cracking
cast responds with near perfection to Parris' flowing direction. James
Denton is achingly vulnerable as Connor, matched by Maragret Boschi's
dippy but astute Gran ­ their kitchen conversations are as funny as
they are heart-rending. Rob Clyne (Jez) and John Last (Mark) keep the
energy going but almost blow their crucial final scene. As Connor's mum
Eileen, Wendy Laurence-James finds savage humour even in her darkest
moments. It may be grim up north but it's certainly not boring. Nick
Awde

HardcorePleasance
Dome - Watching Jonathan Hall's play is like entering a
time warp back thirty years or so to an earlier generation of gay
plays, when the goals were to get the cast's kit off as quickly and
often as possible and to offer the reassurance that homosexuals were
just as normal underneath as the rest of us. Here, auditions for a gay
porn film attract a porn veteran, a neophyte looking for kicks, a
cynical hustler and a straight actor who sees it as just another acting
job. No points for guessing that the veteran is not as hard-nosed as he
seems, that the cynic is just looking for love, that the straight guy's
sexuality is open to question, or that flashbacks will show all four to
have had unhappy childhoods that made them what they are today. Faced
with such stereotypes and with the unlikely dramatic premise of a
consciousness-raising workshop before they're allowed to film, Alex
Hassell, Phil Matthews, Christopher Redmond and Simon Thomas do what
they can to create and sustain a sense of reality, but they are
ultimately defeated by the cliches. Gerald Berkowitz

Hector's House George Square Theatre
- Lip Service are Maggie Fox and Sue Riding, a pair of writer-actresses
who pretend to be earnest amateurs putting on little shows for women's
clubs and the like. It's a recognisable fringe genre, but they are
among the best at it - see our review of their Withering Looks
elsewhere on this page. Here, they take on a 'newly-discovered
Greek-style tragedy' that is in fact the Iliad story, from Paris'
judging the beauty contest (here done as a version of TV's Blind Date)
through the Trojan horse (which they assure us is parked just outside
the theatre). The production is a bit more elaborate than their normal
mode, with a third performer and some film sequences, and there's some
audience involvement, as we are called upon to fill in gaps in the
ancient manuscript, but the basic joke of overreaching theatrical
ambition is still at the core, and still very funny. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Hero of the SlocumHill Street Theatre
- An old New Yorker props up a bar and explains any who'll listen why
he needs a stick to help him walk - an injury sustained long ago, in
1904, when as a 15-year-old he became one of the few surivivors of a
terrible fire. A group of German New Yorkers take a celebratory cruise
up the East River aboard pleasure steamer The General Slocum but the
fun turns to nightmare as the ship catches fire and our teenager vainly
struggles to save himself and his loved ones. They perish - among more
than 1,000 souls - but he survives, floating in the river, his head
gashed open by a looter's boathook. Tabloid hysteria hoists him high as
the hero of the disaster, an error he is powerless to correct as public
cartharsis focuses on him. From the mists of the past Patrick Tull
plucks the voices of the narrator's younger self, of his neighbours, of
his lost family. Period slides and tunes keep a flowing backdrop to the
story which holds you gripped throughout. Tull's treatment of the
snappy script, taken from Eric Blau's novel, is honed by Emily King's
focused direction, resulting in as fruitful a collaboration as you'll
find. Storytelling rarely comes this good. Nick Awde

Alex Horne: Making Fish
LaughAssembly Rooms - In
1976 a convention was held in Wales to produce a scientific report on
what makes people laugh. Ken Dodd was there, and as if to bless the
show, Horne has a pic of Alex Horne and the knight of Knotty Ash
holding up a copy. Its chapters serve as a blueprint for Horne to
create a human laboratory to test the ideal conidtions for laughter. At
his side, nerdy sidekick Tim takes his wry eye from the laptop only
when he needs to scrutinise the levels of audience enjoyment. Slides,
calculator and cheapo tape recorder at the ready, carefully constructed
anarchy ensues as Horne launches into a welter of laughter graphs,
pop-up charts, guffaw/groan Venn diagrams. All prove essential tools to
the experiment in hand as tasks are assigned, data is compiled from the
audience then fed into instruments, and before long the whole hall is
one huge humour analysis centre. Running through the tricky subjects of
deadpan gags, punchlines, audience participation, coincidence and,
obviously, tickling, Horne remains supremely focused and doesn't miss a
trick. Being blinded by science has rarely seemed this fun. Nick
Awde

The HousekeeperC too -
The guests are ushered into a square kitchen where macintoshes are
handed out and obediently donned. Instructions on our correct
deportment are issued curtly but kindly by the housekeeper, who is
promptly joined by three like-attired colleagues. What follows is a
pocket masterpiece of physicality and one of the surprise hits of the
Fringe. Snippets from Mrs Beeton's Housekeeping Manual provide a
springboard for the dialogue, delivered as lists of dos and don'ts,
inventories and repeated affirmation that, in keeping the place
spotless, "it's as if I've never been here!" In between the frenetic
washing-up liquid, mops, baking tins, real-time cuisine and acrobatics,
what starts as a disjointed romp evolves into a darker picture of
concentrated humour. Guided by Anna Fenemore's inspired direction, Anna
Barzotti, Louise Bennett, Gillian Knox and Louisa Penny are a
remarkable performance machine and instantly dispel any thoughts of
claustrophobia through a near psychic feel for space. They ripple
along, shadowed by layers of dialogue that hit dissonance and harmony
until the quartet finally becomes one, their manias and movements
fused. The action throughout is in your face ­ and over the rest of you
as slops, tomatoes and dough get splashed everywhere. But cakes and a
nip of wine keep the appetites whetted for more. Nick Awde

HurricaneAssembly Rooms
- It may not be on the grand scale of Muhammad Ali, but the homegrown
tale of Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins has all the elements of a sportsman
facing adversity on every front. The similarity probably stops there,
since this is the no-holds barred account of the Ulsterman who came to
England, took the snooker world by storm and then lost everything only
to overcome booze and birds and his own ego to stage a comeback that
won him the world championship ­ and then he lost everything all over
again. When Richard Dormer appears as the crumpled, prematurely aged,
ailing Higgins bitching in a bar, you're instantly aware that an
extraordinary talent for characterisation lies beneath the uncanny
resemblance. Time swiftly rewinds into the whirlwind of the younger
man's journey into his older self's present ­ pausing along the way to
visit gruff Higgins senior, spoilt Aussie first wife, loud Lancs agent
and Oliver Reed himself as they arm-wrestle. The boozing is recreated
with the same loving precision as the games. Rachel O'Riordan's
direction overcomes any tendency towards the generic, bringing a
constant undertow of physical action that creates extra dimensions in
the narrative and always keeps you guessing. The standing ovation meant
everyone left a winner. Nick Awde

Ideas MenTheatre
Workshop - This 50 minute piece written and performed by
David Woods and Jon Hough of Ridiculusmus purports to be a satire of
pretensions to creativity in the corporate world. Two ideas men
assigned to come up with the next big thing spend their day playing
games, flirting with secretaries, deferring to superiors, and
complaining about their ideas being stolen. The two performers play all
the roles, continually jumping about in time and place. The result is a
mess. At its best, the piece resembles an acting school exercise in
which they take turns suddenly changing roles or realities, often in
mid-sentence, daring the other to keep up - a game at which neither
actor is particularly good, since they repeatedly forget which
character they're supposed to be, what funny voice they're meant to use
and where they are in the story. Ridiculusmus might argue that this is
all a post-modern joke that the audience is meant to be in on,
ridiculing the concepts of linear plot and coherence. It is in fact an
open expression of contempt for an audience too frightened to admit how
naked the emperor is. Gerald Berkowitz

The InterrogationNetherbow -
After the success of his Winnie the Pooh stories, ace puppeteer Richard
Medrington presents this ambitious full-length show aimed at adults.
It's a complex political tale of life behind the Iron Curtain inspired
by the prison experiences of Silviu Craciunas, a Romanian refugee he
knew in the eighties. Medrington recreates Craciunas' life via his
trademark set-up of splitting the stage into three spaces. In the
centre is the bed that serves both as the nursing home room of 1997
where Craciunas lies after an accident and as the Romanian prison cell
of 1950, where he languishes after his arrest. The stock scenes of
spotlight interrogations, evil prison guards and mysterious visitors
are woven together to create a highly personal tale. Setting the edgy
mood is David Heath's carefully themed music, arranged by John Harris.
Medrington is on the way to achieving his goal but in many respects
this is still a work in progress. In particular he breaks a number of
his own rules ­ he loses personal contact with the audience and permits
too many black-outs between scenes. As the production stands, it's not
sufficiently entertaining as, say, Rizo Gabriadze's The Battle of
Stalingrad. But I suspect these will be ironed out as the show
develops. Nick Awde

Iz Pleasance - Three men who loved
the same woman, two former boyfriends and her husband, mourn her sudden
death. As what is at first an obviously romanticised portrait of the
dancing-in-the-rain vital spirit gradually gives way to more realistic
and even disturbing memories, they find themselves both united and
divided by their grief, taking comfort in shared recollections but
jealous of each other's personal memories. The men each find their way
through the mourning process differently, one dreaming of her, one
seeing her on the street everywhere, one perhaps too coolly moving on.
Dan Bye's direction has the three performers never actually make eye
contact, even in what are fictionally face-to-face scenes. This device
of having them face front or stand at right angles to each other proves
a strong metaphor for their isolation within their their own emotions,
and allows the three performers to create effective individualised
portraits in a short time. A deceptively simple piece, the play has the
power to linger in the memory. Gerald Berkowitz

The Jesus PrincipleGilded Balloon Teviot
- This is an interesting take not so much on Christianity but the
glitzy roadshows of the hard sell masquerading as soft. Andy Williams
and Nick Hodder bound on as cod clerics trying to sell religion as a
product ­ special offers, payment plans, Jesus on a Nokia, you get the
idea. Central to the show is a well designed multimedia presentation
that throws up visual jokes in between the realistic slogans and
spreadsheets. And then up on the screen flashed a series of repellent
sketches of racial, religious and sexual stereotypes. Satire and non-PC
are one thing, ignorance is another. And that's when I lost interest in
the whole thing. Nick Awde

Jukebox TheatreUnderbelly
- The gimmick of this clever show is that they have a menu of about ten
short playlets that each audience gets to choose three or four from, so
there are only-a-math-geek-knows-how-many possible permutations. The
selection I saw was uneven, with David Ives' Arabian Nights the best,
as a creative interpreter turns the buying of a souvenir into a
romantic encounter between shopgirl and tourist. Mary Miller's Ferris
Wheel has a couple meet cute on a fairground ride, while Paul Osuch's
3x3x crosses Groundhog Day with Pirandello, as a script takes on a
repetitive life of its own. The weakest piece was one that seemed the
company's favourite, Laura Cunningham's Flop Cop, about trying to calm
a panicking fringe playwright. Gerald Berkowitz

Kaye's the Word!Pleasance -
Singer Paul Hull offers this loving salute to singer-comedian Danny
Kaye in a fast-moving and pleasant hour. For those who don't remember
Kaye, he was a Broadway and Hollywood star of the 1940s and 1950s, a
physical clown like Jim Carrey who was also an excellent jazz singer,
with a special affinity for scat and patter songs. Hull makes little
attempt to capture Kaye the comedian, except to the extent that he is
reflected in the songs, but focuses on his musical repertoire, with
comic songs like the Russian composer tour-de-force and Anatole of
Paris, jazz standards like Minnie the Moocher, and a medley of the
lovely songs from the film Hans Christian Andersen. Without slavish
imitation, Hull captures Kaye's phrasing and intonations well, making
for a lovely nostalgia trip. And if that whets your appetite for the
comic Kaye, I suggest you rent his best film, The Court Jester. Gerald
Berkowitz

Kept Their HumanityUnderbelly
- It's 1994. The Hutu people are slaughtering the Tutsi people. They
happen to all be citizens of the same small nation, Rwanda. This had
been brewing for decades but when the slaughter turned to genocide the
world just watched until it was too late. There were witnesses to the
darkest moments, however - foreign correspondents and UN forces sent
"in an observational capacity". Through the innovative split-narrative
of this provocative play, we see the horror unfold, reflected through
these Western eyes. As the journalist just off the plane, Leila Rejali
wins your sympathy as she struggles with an assignment no training
could have prepared her for. Claire Spence gives a powerfully sensitive
portrayal of the Tutsi girl who seeks protection as the reporter's
guide yet refuses to let her hopes die. Paralleling their journey into
hell is the impotent soldier, played by Dominic Brewer with worldweary
conviction, whose eloquent despatches reveal his haunted conscience.
Writer-director James Hammond at no point allows the message obstruct
the drama and he constantly ambushes with flashes of humour, making
this is a must-see - not only for your conscience but also as one of
the most compelling dramas on the Fringe this year. Nick Awde

KidPleasance -
Playwright Chris O'Connell has hit that difficult third play stage in
his Street Trilogy, and while the result is not as powerful as its
predecessors Car and Raw, it has all their impactful anger. The sun is
out and the baby clothes are already up on the line as heavily pregnant
Zoe (Samantha Power) tries to relax in the garden, but boyfriend Lee
(Paul Simpson) just can't sit still. The aggression boils and subsides
with depressing regularity and isn't helped by the equally restless
Bradley (Rebekah Manning), Lee's teenage hiphop sibling. These are the
neighbours from hell but that's nothing to the internal hell they're
living, and the tension increases with the arrival of Lee's long-gone
mate K (Richard Oldham), who just adds another level to the numbing
pecking order that dictates their lives. And, of course, everyone's
sharing a grim secret. The writing piles on the significant looks and
Northern bravado that can tend to the relentless, amplified by director
Mark Babych. The result is some great set pieces but uneven action ­
the flashbacks in particular don't really work ­ and so things can get
a bit bitty in an otherwise stunning production. Hard-hitting,
uncompromising and insanely overambitious, someone now needs to quickly
option the whole trilogy for the National. Nick Awde

Kit and the WidowStage by Stage
- It's almost a cliche to say that this veteran duo are today's version
of Flanders and Swann, but that really is the best way to explain their
genteel and laid-back mode of singing cleverly naughty songs, like the
one inspired by the fact that the composer of one archetypal English
song was not only an Australian but a kinky one, leading them to
speculate on just what sorts of goings-on you might find in an English
country garden. Uncharacteristically political material has been
creeping into their shows in recent years, and the current one has a
bit too many songs about Blair and Bush for me, though the mock holiday
advertisement for Camp X-Ray is witty both in words and music. More to
my taste are the love song in TXT language and the lament for
diminishing ocean life with references to the sole sole and the bloater
quota. They may be a little too camp for some and too soft-edged for
others, but if you like your satire and entertainment with a cultured
air, they're a lot of fun. Gerald Berkowitz

KvetchPleasance - One of Steven
Berkoff's minor works, this broad comic study in social unease uses the
device of repeatedly freezing a frame while one or another character
expresses his fear of making a social gaffe, before going ahead and
doing it. The whole is done in thick London-Jewish accents and milieu,
as the title suggests. The young actors of Theatre Vivant come from
north London, not all that far from Golders Green, but they give the
impression of never having met a Jew in their lives. Some wander in and
out of the accent, while others don't even try, and none can even
pronounce the word kvetch (much less any of the other Yiddishisms
sprinkled through the text) correctly. Some of the jokes still work,
but this is clearly a directoral failure, either in picking a play that
was beyond the cast's abilities or in not guiding them through
it. Gerald Berkowitz

Love, Lust and Lonely HeartsSt. Johnıs Hall
- The title seems to imply a tale of computer dating or the like, but
instead this company-created piece tells a more domestic soap-opera
tale in an inventive way. The lives of two couples are threatened when,
in the course of 24 hours, one husband and the other wife declare their
love, consider running off, and then decide it would be best to return
to their forgiving spouses. The whole is done in Shakespearean
language, with lines seamlessly cut and pasted from a dozen plays and
several sonnets to make relevant and coherent conversations. This young
company's ambitions are admirable, even if the product is not as
impressive as they might wish. The technical achievement aside, the
Shakespearean quoting does not achieve the aim of elevating and
dignifying the soap opera story, but actually calls attention to its
banality. A pattern of marking the passage of the day by hanging up
bits of costume with the hour marked on them seems just a gimmick.
Despite earnest performances by Scott Brooksbank, Andrew Fishwick, Sara
Masters and Helen Murton all the inventiveness seems to have gone into
the presentational devices, leaving little to free the story from
cliche or the characters from stereotype. Gerald Berkowitz

The Loves of Shakespeare's WomenSt George's West Church (reviewed at a previous
Fringe) - Susannah York offers a programme of
linked readings from Shakespeare as part of a promotional tour for her
book of the same name. Every actor should have a solo show like this,
that they can trot out to fill fallow periods, and there is no reason
why York can't continue doing this one, on and off, for years - no
reason except that it's not particularly good. Her readings, ranging
through the usual suspects, from Juliet through Cleopatra, are rather
perfunctory and unevocative, playing either like lifeless recitations
or over-explicit audition pieces, while the links are obviously
sentences taken out of context from the book, with abrupt and jarring
transitions. Above all, the programme fails my two acid tests for this
sort of reading: does she offer any excitingly new line readings or
interpretations, or does she make me wish I could see her in one of
these roles? The audience I was in was dominated by a coach party of
Americans, between their city tour and their afternoon of shopping, and
they applauded politely. I'm sure there are plenty of people like this
who will enjoy York's painless foray into high culture, but I am not
one of them. Gerald Berkowitz

Linda Marlowe: No FearAssembly Rooms
- Linda Marlowe is an actress who has no difficulty holding a stage on
her own, and this self-penned hour is a good showcase for her
versatility and high energy. In a roughly autobiographical structure,
she takes us through a history of triumphing over fears, be they the
nerves of a first audition or joining forces with her first husband's
second wife to deal with his third girlfriend. Accounts of the births
of her children are both comic and moving, and her range includes
songs, acrobatics and a couple of rhymed narratives in the style of
Stephen Berkoff. If there is any flaw to the piece it is that it is too
highly polished, with even the ad libs and moments of audience
interacting seeming totally scripted and frozen. Gerald
Berkowitz

McCloud & Black:
The HookPleasance -
The twee chaos of parents' sports day seems an unlikely first-choice
scenario for a sophisticated sketch show, but Jessica McCloud and Laura
Black go to the top of the class for this darkly comic take on the
mores of middle-class mums and their schoolkid offspring. Everyone's a
little on edge as they prepare for the great day. A pair of chalk and
cheese sisters are teachers on the staff. There's Miss Jolly Hockey
Sticks ('The kids ­ it's all about trust!') who lays into Miss Couldn't
Care Less ('They steal your sandwiches'), and everything somehow leads
into a row over casting for the school play. Meanwhile, Working Mum and
Homely Mum swap saccharine claims of maternal martyrdom over lunch.
Their daughters pop up later, perfectly formed personalities and the
complete opposites of the big kids who brought them into this world.
The scenes build into a complete story climaxing in the big event when
embarrassment erupts, rivalries come to a head and carnage ensues.
Perfect for radio and TV alike, the humour picks up on the type of
velvet-gloved satire that French and Saunders lost the plot on years
ago. As gifted writers-performers, McCloud and Black could well be
natural successors. Nick Awde

McNaughtonclubWEST - McNaughton was the
nineteenth-century Scot whose mad criminal act led to the legal rule -
if they know right from wrong, they're sane - that still operates in
some jurisdictions. So there might be a good play in his story - who he
was, what he did, what his madness was, how the rule entered
jurisprudence. Unfortunately Steve Gooch hasn't written that play. His
script gives McNaughton a monologue that answers virtually none of
those questions, indicating only that he was paranoid in some way. How
that led to his crime is never made clear - indeed, who he shot and
what happened to the victim are so glossed over that you'd need to know
the facts coming in to make sense of the story. And the trial and legal
precedent are evidently of no interest at all to the playwright. Or
perhaps I'm being unfair. As McNaughton, Stewart Preston is so
unprepared that, between several calls for prompting, the long pauses,
circular rambling and evident omission of key plot facts may well be
his rather than the author's. Were this underwritten, underdirected,
underrehearsed show offered for free, it would be an imposition on the
audience's time. The fact that they charge for tickets should embarrass
all involved. Gerald Berkowitz

Meat
& Two VegTheatre Workshop (reviewed
in London) - Cartoon de Salvo is a
trio of writer-performers who honed their skills in street theatre, an
arena that demands constant inventiveness and instant audience rapport.
Meat & Two Veg is a 1950s-era deconstruction of Twelfth Night,
a warm and inventive comedy that raises the techniques and spirit of
street theatre to new heights and pokes benignly satiric fun at both
the innocence of mid-century middle England and the absurdities of
Shakespearean romance. When young Violet, played by David Bernstein,
dresses in her absent brother's clothes, she is accepted as a playmate
by Brian Logan's neighbour boy, who sends her with a love note to Alex
Murdoch's Olive, and the evocation of an England just about to enter
the rock'n'roll era is so delightful that we are halfway into the plot
before we realise it's been cribbed from Shakespeare. The company's
street theatre roots are evident in the quick changes, instant
characterisations, ingenious use of Becky Hurst's simple set, and
amiable communion with the audience. Witty episodes employing shadow
puppets, Potteresque use of pop music to express the characters'
emotions, and touches of the totally absurd, like a Sicilian skittle
trio, keep the level of invention and engagement high. At only a few
moments do the Shakespearean plot and 1950s pastiche seem to be
fighting for the play's focus rather than supporting each other, and
the whole might benefit from a bit more energy and pacing. But how can
one cavil with a company who stop the performance in mid-plot to call a
tea break, and then share their tea and biscuits with us?
Gerald Berkowitz

MentalAssembly Rooms
- Inspired by their experience of being trainee psychiatric nurses
together years ago, Jo Brand and Helen Griffin have concocted an
unsettling two-hander between them that is a mini-masterpiece of dark
humour tinged with social commentary. Funnily enough, their characters,
Jean and Pat, are also mental nurses. Stuck in a south London asylum in
south London, it's hard to distinguish them from their charges, such is
the degree of their own institutionalisation. In a world informed by
Asda, OK! and reality TV, they bitch and carp as they endure the daily
drudgery of incident forms, medication levels, averting ward deaths,
well-hung inmates and their own valium intake. Jean worries about her
loose stools, food additives and God while Pat finds bored solace
winding her up at every opportunity. After a shaky first ten minutes,
the relationship starts to take shape. As the crabby Jean, Griffin
brings a vulnerability underlying the crotchety exterior while Brand is
deliciously profane as Pat, her trademark stand-up delivery making the
transition well to drama. As director-writers, they transform the
chair-bound action into a dramatic virtue and commendably avoid the
temptation to make this a star vehicle for the more exposed Brand.
Definitely one of the must-sees of the Fringe. Nick Awde

Miguel StreetTheatre Workshop
- V. S. Naipaul's novel of growing up in Trinidad has been adapted for
the stage into a solo show, with Jim Findlay playing the young boy who
watches and describes the lively community in his run-down section of
Port of Spain. He introduces us to such characters as the carpenter who
spends his days diligently building nothing, the street preacher who
comes to think he is the messiah and isn't satisfied until he is
crucified, and the self-proclaimed poet who is composing an epic at the
rate of one line a month. Findlay uses Naipaul's words to bring each of
these figures to life with very little in the way of impersonation, and
also conjures up a sense of the vital, peaceful community in which even
a crisis like a woman deserting her husband merely becomes the subject
for a hit calypso song. The linear structure of the novel does not
translate effectively to the stage, however. With few changes in rhythm
or intensity, few highs or lows, and little in the way of forward
movement, it becomes an extended string of shaggy dog stories with no
real payoffs or climaxes. Gerald Berkowitz

Missing MemawHill Street Theatre - This intriguing
trilogy is a multimedia showcase for the combined talents of director
Stephan Mazurek and writer/performer Loren Crawford, both from America.
Missing Memaw opens, Crawford's ambitious stream of self-penned pieces
inspired by the surreal slides of the backdrop. She talks with
restrained passion of dodos, lucky charms, a plea to believe in God ­
and mostly avoids oversentimentality. More poet than playwright, the
substance of Crawford's pieces pales before the beauty of the whole,
created from images, music and the rippling sounds of the words
themselves. Next up is Mazurek's short film Isolation of Desire, acted
out by XSight! Performance Group. Moody shots of moody people moving
moodily to an edgy drum soundtrack evoke Cremaster, Mat Eks, Last Year
in Marianbad and so on. A bit of bondage, mysterious rooms and slogans
flash over female necklines. Arresting as the imagery is, it's only a
matter of time before the girls get their kit off. No complaints there
but in order to redress the balance of gender perception surely Mazurek
could have found better looking men? The closer is The Canary, based on
a short story by Katherine Mansfield, a contemporary of Virginia Woolf.
Again Crawford brings her emotive approach to the monologue, bringing
this valedictory memoir to poetic life, but she is let down somewhat by
an accent that veers from Vienna to Alice Springs. Nick Awde

Monty Python's Flying CircusPleasance
- Compounding absurdity upon absurdity, this Paris-based company
performs Monty Python sketches in French and Franglais, with subtitles
for their British audiences. No attempt is made to imitate
the original performers, and indeed the general effect is of watching
skilled clowns who have read the scripts but never actually seen the TV
show, and who are thus free to interpret the material for themselves..
Thus some bits come out more-or-less like the originals, as with the
instructions on defending yourself from fruit, where the insertion of a
woman in the John Cleese role actually makes very little difference.
Others, like the Llama Song or the gangsters planning an innocent
purchase as if it were a robbery, bear little resemblance to the TV
versions but work on their own terms. And icons like the Dead Parrot
and the Lumberjack Song are so embedded in British consciousness that
any differences here go by unnoticed. A few bits don't work at all, and
none are really improved by the Gallic transformation, which can't help
but raise the question of Why? To which, perhaps, the reply is Why not?
Gerald Berkowitz

A Most Curious Murder - The
Madeleine Smith StorySweet at the Crowne Plaza
- Unless you're at the Traverse, rule number one at the Fringe is to
never have an interval no matter how many hours your show runs. The
surprisingly untechnical explanation is that once you let 'em out they
never come back. This is the first Edinburgh show I've ever seen with
an interval. They never came back. This rambling musical tells the tale
of Madeleine Smith, a nice upper middle-class girl put in the dock
accused of the murder of her secret lover prior to her marriage to
another man. Act I reveals the protagonists and what may have happened,
Act II covers the court case. Original research is claimed that throws
light on the 19th century events. Not really. Rachel Grainger's book is
cut and paste dialogue that is neither historical, whodunit nor noire,
rendering her characters as cardboard cutouts. The poppy songs are at
odds with the Victorian parlour period and the styles clash. The ballad
What Kind of Man?, however, is one of those exceptions that prove the
rule, and Alana Bell as Madeleine is given a chance to show off her
vocal ability. Costumes and set aside, this show is nowhere near ready
for public consumption ­ and it's hardly fair on the hardworking cast,
who gamefully give all they've got to bring things to a sort of
conclusion. Nick Awde

My
Husband Is A SpacemanTheatre Workshop
(reviewed in London) - Kazuko Hohki, half of
the 1980s Japanese pop duo Frank Chickens, was always more of a
performance artist than a pop singer. The title of this show is a
metaphor of culture clash, with the twist that the alien is a
conventional Englishman as seen by his Japanese wife. Kazuko begins
with a traditional Japanese folk tale that is a variant on the Frog
Prince, of a man befriending a crane who becomes his wife and then
departs as a bird again. Kazuko has had a similar adventure, she
announces, taking us back to her Tokyo days, when she befriended a duck
in a Tokyo park, and was convinced that he reappeared as the British
anthropologist who met and married her, bringing her back to an England
she only knew from old movies. Now she's beginning to feel like an
alien herself, and fears he is transforming her into his species with
all those cups of English tea, but if she exposes his secret, he may
disappear like the crane in the story. It's a lovely tale, half folk
myth and half high comedy, and Kazuko simply stands onstage and tells
it, in a heavily-accented English that is occasionally indecipherable.
She has a few props, notably a series of things - book, teacup, pillow
- with large pink noses attached to represent her husband. But the most
inventive elements come in a projected video behind her, where she has
concocted animated origami puppets to add flavour to the play's folk
tale elements, and collages that inventively place her, Zelig-like, in
a variety of English scenes. There's some karioke-style singing in both
Japanese and English (and, to be honest, she may be halfway through the
song before you can tell which), and the whole thing is alternatingly
poetically evocative, very funny, and totally opaque - just about all
you could ask from a performance piece.Gerald Berkowitz

Napoleon in ExileTraverse - The
Camden People's Theatre's latest group-created piece is a study in loss
of roots and self-redefinition that is frequently evocative and
beautiful but ultimately has difficulty hanging together. An amnesia
victim who has given up trying to rediscover his old self and is trying
to create a new one encounters a young woman who thinks she is Napoleon
and spends all her time writing love letters to Josephine. Both are
under the care of a doctor who seems to have no life outside his office
and a Finnish nurse studying French. Each of the four characters in
search of an identity has his or her own story, each of them moving and
sympathetic. But it is in the too-infrequent moments that they bounce
off each other that the play really comes alive, as when the two
patients join in a lovely dance of lost souls or the doctor attempts to
express his jumbled and inchoate feelings for the nurse. Chris Goode
directs with an eye for the moving stage image or
character-illuminating moment, and the cast of four movingly inhabit
the roles they helped create. Gerald Berkowitz

Nearly at the NationalUnderbelly
- Three girls and three guys romp through the theatrical canon,
showcasing their talents through wicked spoofs that cover an impressive
range of genres in a single hour. There's a certain excitement in
catching this sort of revue since it has become something of a
vanishing tradition. Delivering clipped vowels like gunshots, Laurella
Fox-Pitt and Daniel Napier give a delicious take on Noel Coward's
Private Lives and discuss tumours amidst the ennui and cigarette smoke.
Andrew 'Lord' Lloyd Webber is next on the block in the shape of Chris
Fitchew. Frighteningly made up as Norma Desmond, he delivers a
heartfelt, gloriously OTT ballad about being 'just the understudy'.
Sending up Alan Ayckbourne might be a touch redundant but Rebecca Lisi
and Sarah Ireland show impeccable timing as they gleefully recount what
their characters are doing in the farce-meister's style. An example of
genius coupling is the Jane Austen/Edward Albee piece where Emma
(Ireland) and Mr Knightly (Napier) valiantly attempt conversation with
Laurella and Adam Shipway, straight out of Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? Excellent performances all round, though cast and director can't
always make up their minds whether to play it straight or ham things
up. To be honest, this isnt a song and dance troupe and the plays
rather than the musicals bring out the best performances. Nick
Awde

Nice Mum Are Chocolate
BendersGilded Balloon Caves
- Spreadsheet comedy as spearheaded by Dave Gorman is now the new
rock'n'roll and already the spoofs are erupting around you. Kris Dyer
and Dave Marks, aka Nice Mum, are so laid-back in their 'letıs
Powerpoint our ideas for a Fringe show' methodology that theyıre
spoofing the spoofs. The result is one of the funniest shows of the
Fringe. Marks is the straight guy ­ at least when compared to Dyer, the
one with the alarming lapses into animal behaviour and guzzling the
chocolate that forms their show's raison d'etre. At the beginning of
this year neither had a clue what the show was going to be about but,
inspired by a Curly Wurly, they decided to plan to test the bendiness
of chocolate bars. Off went the usual flurry of emails, letters and
phone calls to public figures (Uri Geller) and corporations (Cadburys).
Geller confirmed he can bend Yorkie bars with his eyes, Cadburys sent a
£1.50 voucher. What then follows is very difficult to describe. It's
chaotic, it's all over the place but audience participation is instant
while the duo are so infectious that lead-balloon puns and fluffed
lines become a line of gags in their own right. Simply crying out for a
TV contract. Nick Awde

1933
And All ThatSt. John's Hall (reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - This recital by Anna
Zapparoli of songs by Brecht, Weill and others is all the more pleasant
for being predictable - there are few songs or poems that the fan will
not have heard before on similar programmes. But you can't hear
Surabaya Johnny, the Solomon Song, Pirate Jenny and the like too often,
especially not when sung with as much grace and intelligence as
Zapparoli brings to them. Less familiar songs, like the Brecht-Eisler
Song of the Nazi Soldier's Wife and a couple by Wedekind, are
particularly welcome additions, and backing by a small band led by
Mario Borciani is strong and unobtrusive. No credit is given for the
translations, which I haven't encountered before, but they are good,
combining accuracy with singability. Gerald Berkowitz

Nine Parts of DesireTraverse - Provocative yet
lyrical, this series of portraits brings unique insight into the
liberation and oppression of Iraqi women by both US bombs and the
strictures of their own society. Writer-performer Iraqi-American
Heather Raffo brings her characters to life with convincing passion.
Layal is a Baghdadi artist, delighting in her sensuality. She paints
the older Amal who recounts leaving her Saudi husband in London.
Another sitter is The American, whose father is Iraqi and who tells of
powerlessness as her relatives sit at the mercy of US forces. Others
punctuate the proceedings as war rages and its aftermath begins. Raffo
instantly connects and her mannerisms are spot-on, producing unexpected
flashes of both humour and pathos. She falters however in her
demarcation of characters - accents are wobbly, as is her unforgiveable
pronunciation of Arabic words, while a weak script makes times, places,
nationalities and religions difficult to track. Credit therefore goes
to director Eva Breneman for bringing out the best in performer and
play while allowing Raffo's vision to shine through. More Middle
England than Middle East, the nation's liberals will overlook any
cracks - healthy applause assuages the guilt nicely. But it is the
power of Raffo's performance that makes this such a compelling success.
Nick Awde

Ross Noble - UnrealtimeAssembly Rooms
- Ross Noble is a very funny guy, almost certainly the fastest-thinking
and most inventive comic on the circuit today. While just about every
comic starts his show with some audience interaction, Noble is
confident enough to build as much as half his set on the flights of
fancy that come to him on encountering someone in a funny coloured
shirt, say, or an unexpected child. The nearest parallel I can draw is
to Robin Williams when he's on a roll, but without the slightly scary
sense of desperate compulsiveness Williams often betrays. That said,
Noble's current show seems somewhat more dependent on prepared material
than in the past, a shift he effectively disguises by jumping around
among several uncompleted bits in a seemingly random stream of
consciousness before tying them all up, along with the improvised
audience stuff, just as his hour runs out. Gerald Berkowitz

Only the LonelyRoman Eagle Lodge
- The back pages of the theatrical newspaper The Stage are filled with
ads for tribute and look-alike acts, and I have always wondered what it
was like trying to earn a living as an imitation Elvis or Kylie. Pip
Utton's latest solo show addresses those questions in a convincing and
moving picture of a man who has failed at everything in his life except
for his ability to entertain undemanding audiences with an imitation of
Roy Orbison. Utton takes us through the man's story, singing
occasionally with just the right quality of not-quite-good-enough, and
helps us understand how someone who has no real life of his own could
choose another's. As his character says, "I know who I am. I'm somebody
else." In Utton's signature style, it's a quiet piece that sneaks up on
you with its emotional power. Gerald Berkowitz

The PalindromeThe Roxy - An office. Any old
office you might think, but here things are done a little differently
as a slick executive stands expectantly by his desk. Flustered job
applicant Wry Slant (Henry Layte) arrives after having sent his CV and
photo to Sir (Philip Bosworth). In the interview that ensues, every
vagueness or generalisation is taken at face value until their
converstation becomes a solid volley of left-field questions and
philisophical non-sequiturs. All the while, Bertrand (Chas Allen)
provides devoted service whether he's fetching drinks or gagging Slant
with his tie. After descending momentarily into dark violence, a very
different meeting (or is it?) takes place a week later. The cast deal
with the dialogue well and their timing is spot-on but one feels they
are held back from truly exploring the comedic and farcical elements
here. There is some interesting writing here by Layte, but instead of
delving into abstract questions of identity, the reward would be
greater if he made this into a dark farce or even a direct attack on
corporatism. Perhaps this is what Kafka would have done if he'd written
The Office. To be honest though, Monty Python took less than five
minutes to make a similar point. Nick Awde

Pansori: The Saga of HeungboReid Concert Hall
- After their father dies, the poor second son is kicked out of the
family home by the elder son who inherits everything. Struggling with
poverty, the ousted youth finds happiness in his nest eggs ­ in this
case magic gourds from a wounded swallow that pour forth riches. His
brother's greed leads him to grab his own gourds, but reaps evil
goblins instead. So not quite a happy ending for all in this tale of
sibling rivalry. Welcome to pansori, a revived form of storytelling in
song unique to Korea ­ imagine Under Milk Wood sung in Korean with
accompanying percussion. Singer Kim Soo-yeon adds to her unfaltering
voice a compelling range of subtle movement ­ from the air she eats the
gourds, her fan becomes a swallow ­ all the while breaking off to pass
comment on the brothers' rift or the hangover status of her
percussionist. Meanwhile buk drummers Lee Tae-baek (first half) and
Jung Hwa-young (second half) vary the beat according to mood, and
vocally bring their own brand of humour to create a foil in what must
be one of world culture's more intriguing double acts. While the show
is lengthy, it is really a cycle of shorter episodes with each 'song'
lasting no more than a few minutes. Aided by accurate, witty surtitles,
Kim's exquisite movement and earthy language makes it all accessible
and entertaining. For once the EIF's erratic programming has got it
right. Nick Awde

Nicholas Parsons as WS
Gilbert, 'A Great Victorian'Pleasance
- In this engaging one-man play we meet WS Gilbert, the words half of
opera's hitmaking partnership Gilbert and Sullivan. It's 1906, the
great man is in his seventies, his partner long gone, but he's still
brimming with ideas with not a spark of his ambition dimmed. A
consummate satirist, Gilbert gives us the benefit of his views on the
political events of the day and wonders where things may or may not
lead. In between, he talks of his family and Sullivan, avoids answering
his newfangled telephone, and reads his own works to the delight of the
audience. Sadly there's no Major General's Song but selections of his
lesser works, which prove just as comic. As Gilbert, Nicholas Parsons
is, well, Nicholas Parsons. He can do no wrong with his audiences and
is something of a gift for Noel Ross-Russell's script as he brings just
the right balance of gravitas and wit to the role. The end of the
Victorian era has strong resonances for us today at the beginning of
the 21st century, particularly in Britain, but the parallels attempted
here are somewhat forced and the time could be better spent on more of
Gilbert the writer. With a little more development, this will
undoubtedly prove a winner. Nick Awde

Peepolykus: MindbenderAssembly Rooms
- From the very first sight gag of Peepolykus's spanking new show
you're in their power. In a mimed backstage sequence Iberian
mind-reader extraordinaire Michael Santos berates his sidekick because
the curtain's delayed, but both have a problem with where the imaginary
wall should actually be. You can't hear a word but if you can lipread
Spanish it helps. Once they get the show up and running, Santos (David
Sant) reveals himself to be a smarmy showman aided (or not, as the case
may be) by his over-enthusiastic stooge Colin (Javier Marzan) while
Raymond (John Nicholson) is the mistreated plant, who storms off at one
point to seek improved prospects with Paul Daniels up the road. The
mind routines go hopelessly wrong or are blatantly rigged - guessing an
audience member's name, palm reading, relieving the plant of his watch
- you've seen them all before but never this badly and never this
funny. Like bastard sons of the Marx Brothers, the trio not only send
up the mind games genre but also mercilessly pillory their own clown
speciality. Director Darren Tunstall ensures it's impossible to tell
between scripted and improvised moments. Irony taken to its logical,
hilarious extremes. Nick Awde

The People Next DoorTraverse - A
spaced-out doper with mental problems is forced by a bent cop into
infiltrating the local mosque in search of terrorists. But the
reluctant mole is actually drawn to the peaceful community of Islam
while he and his own neighbours - a Scots grannie and a lost kid - find
their resistance to the cop generating a sense of unity and purpose for
them. Henry Adam's play is part black comedy built around the loser's
complete inappropriateness for his assignment, part drama of good sense
winning out over Islamophobic hysteria, part soap opera of the
neighbours' domestic problems. Despite strong moments in each mode, the
play's diverse intentions end up at cross purposes, with not a
consistent enough pattern of laughs for the comedy or sufficient
tension for the drama to score fully, and director Roxana Silbert has
been unable fully to conquer that difficulty. Fraser Ayres as the
hapless hero is the only member of the cast whose role is not a
stereotype, and thus the only one able to do much with it, giving the
guy a whining resistance to anything that involves getting up off the
couch and yet a good heart that carries him through to the happiest
available ending. Gerald Berkowitz

Pickle Assembly Rooms
- India Ink, a multiracial New Zealand company, present a moving and
delightful story that combines telling insights into the immigrant
experience with the dreamlike quality of a fiary tale. The young Indian
manager of a hotel loves the porter, who is actually a skilled heart
surgeon awaiting the re-credentialing required by his new country. But
past experiences have convinced her that she is cursed, and the arrival
of a hotel guest who may be Death himself compounds her emotional
dilemma. The company mix masks, mime and self-referential jokes with
realistic playing, and it all works to create an engaging fable that we
follow with exactly the same involvement, fear and delight in the
resolution as children listening to a bedtime
story. Gerald Berkowitz

The Pickled KingGilded Balloon Teviot - This group-created
mock folk tale is inventive in concept and frequently clever in
execution, but lacks pacing and edge, remaining amiable when it wants
to be sharp, ambling when it should be snappy. A king preserved in a
pickle jar, a usurping prince, a body-snatcher with poetic ambitions
and several other characters are all played by the three
writer-performers, in a story that has the king revived just in time to
save the realm from his evil son. Touches of absurd colours in the plot
and characterizations are evidence that the tone being reached for was
more comic than whimsical, as some of the conventions of the genre are
sent up as soon as they are invoked. But an inconsistancy of tone and a
general lack of pacing repeatedly dissipate comic momentum as soon as
it is established, and the piece remains a collection of effective
moments all but lost in the intervening weak stretches. Gerald
Berkowitz

Playing the VictimTraverse - This satiric comedy,
performed by the company Told By An Idiot, plays so
comfortably as a study in British eccentricity that it is a bit of a
shock to look at the programme and be reminded it is translated from
the Russian of the Presnyakov brothers. A young man, played with a
delightful deadpan by Andrew Scott, avoids real work by taking a job as
the dead body in police reconstructions of murders, and we see several
such investigations, all led by the same eccentric Inspector (Paul
Hunter) and his hapless assistants, along with a string of remarkably
helpful suspects. There's a three-minute bit of almost unbearable
hilarity involving Amanda Lawrence as a singing Japanese waitress, but
a very weak self-referential ending almost spoils the whole
thing. Gerald Berkowitz

Point of YesUnderbelly
- We're all supposed to be worrying about chemical warfare today, but
they've had it for years in the East End of Glasgow. Since 1979 in
fact, when heroin first hit the streets. Janey Godley's harrowing yet
comic eyewitness account documents the spread of the drug and the
devastation it has caused on an already devastated community. This is
the East End of gangsters, street fighters, factory workers and
everyone who remembers wee Billy Connolly down their street. A
17-year-old newlywed arrives to run the local pub with her harsh but
loving husband. From her vantage point behind the bar, she observes the
first dealers move in, an event followed immediately by the first
junkies. Not only are there smackheads, jakies and single mothers but
also artists, musicians and writers seduced by the needle. There are
searing bursts of humour as saying yes to smack is put firmly in its
cultural context ­ while the rest of us were watching Charles take Di
up the aisle, the junkies are just shooting up or trying to flog her
the dirty bra or kitten in their pocket. It's hard-hitting stuff, but
Godley is a committed communicater who refuses to oversentimalise or
lapse into impenetrable colloquialisms, while keeping true to the
reality she's sharing. Nick Awde

Pugilist SpecialistPleasance
- Adriano Shaplin's new play for The Riot Group is a dissection of the
military mind that sensitively and not unsympathetically shows us what
makes strong and intelligent people submerge their identities and even
individual values to military discipline. We watch four marines on a
covert assassination mission: the commander just wants to get a job
done, the communications man withdraws into the comfortable distance of
observer, the sharpshooter is driven by the pride of his expertise, and
the one woman in the group has defined her personal feminism as never
failing. Shaplin directs them - Drew Friedman, Paul Schnabel, Stephanie
Viola and himself - to an almost parrot-like uniformity of vocabulary
and speech patters, the 'almost' being the key, as we see how each of
them adapts military jargon and discipline to meet their individual
needs. The play has a surprise ending, but it is the intense
intelligence of what goes on before then that is its greatest
strength. Gerald Berkowitz

Red Hat and Tales Assembly Rooms
- Sometimes it seems that an author deliberately sets himself a
challenge. How successful would you expect a play to be about a man and
woman, both bisexual, literally living in a closet while he writes
bitchy postcards to everyone he's ever known and she doesn't mail them,
pausing only to check whether he's put in a postscript to her, his only
way of communicating? Factor in his dead brother and her long-lost
childhood friend, to make it even harder. And yet Nick Salamone makes
it work as a study of two people so immersed in their own griefs that
theyıve lost touch with each other, and he and Elizabeth O'Connell make
the hour both funny and touching. Gerald Berkowitz

The Return C Venue -
Two toughs on a late-night train start flirting with a girl who is the
only other rider. Things get a little menacing, even after other
passengers get on. We've been here before, and even though
Reg Cribb's plot takes some twists and turns, and some characters are
made to do or say unlikely things, the surprises in this Australian
play are all telegraphed well in advance, and anyone who isn't way
ahead of things at every point just isn't paying attention. What makes
it all work are solid performances, particularly by Alistair
Scott-Young as the more forceful of the hoods and Melanie Vallejo as
the girl who is not as vulnerable as she seems, and direction by
Geordie Brookman that keeps the tension high. Gerald
Berkowitz

Saint HollywoodGilded Balloon Teviot
- Through monologue and song, gravel-voiced Willard Morgan introduces
himself ­ a New Yorker actor from Hollywood ­ still smarting from
forking out $200 in sushi to impress a girl or cruising the blacktop
freeway to California in a black Cadillac. Other colourful oddbods line
up to introduce themselves ­ the lecherous Russian cabbie, a
wheelchair-bound transgender Latino, the doo-wap ex consigned to
girlfriend heaven. Aided by the ace duo of guitarist Riley Briggs and
percussionist Ian Stoddart, it takes a couple of numbers to get the
feel for Morgan's world but once you're there it's an intriguing,
entertaining even educational world as you realise that every one of
these loonies is based on a real life character. And then he takes his
clothes off, jumps into a white catsuit and reappears as Jelvis, the
Jewish Elvis. And so carefully crafted satire turns to parody and it
becomes just another show with just another Elvis impersonator.
Classfication at the Fringe can be a problem and this comedy show would
be better listed under theatre. Despite the unorthodox delivery, the
depth of Morgan's material is pure drama, while his subjects are so LA
that other Americans, let alone Europeans, will struggle to get the
nuances if they're just looking for a laugh. Nick Awde

Salt o'the EarthBrunton Theatre,
Musselburgh - This touring solo show follows the popular
Irish-Scot raconteur Little John Nee on a fictionalised journey from a
Glasgow childhood to a Spanish mountain and home again, by way of
Ireland and France and a number of comic and romantic adventures. If it
has a point beyond the pleasures of the trip itself, it is the
comforting reassurance that good things eventually happen to good folk.
There is little that is new in the Glasgow section of the monologue,
though the milieu is conjured up evocatively. It is when he goes to
Ireland and somehow hooks up with a belly dancer and a touring band
that the account begins to take on the dimensions of a tall tale that
will eventually embrace gypsies, a decadent Berlin night club, Islamic
Celtics fans, talking rocks, and a woman he had a crush on when he was
five years old. Little John Lee is an amiable storyteller and, as he
too infrequently demonstrates, a loping, rubber-limbed physical clown.
But even the relatively small dimensions of the Brunton Theatre force
him to push his fragile material harder than is ideal and to bray what
should be quiet little songs. Just up the road at the Edinburgh Fringe
are dozens of shows in a similar genre, and one can't help feeling this
one would be more at home in a small intimate room than in this
slightly overblown production. Gerald Berkowitz

San DiegoRoyal Lyceum Theatre
- David Greig is back at the International Festival with this
multi-stranded Altmanesque tale of all manner of human flotsam, set in
San Diego. Well, things happen in the States, others happen in Britain
and there's a bit of flying between the two, and Nigeria even gets a
look in. A character with the same name as the playwright talks of
flying to San Diego, and once there he meets a string of people whose
lives all touch on one another in unexpected ways. More Angels in
America than Our Town, there are some classic Greigisms and genuine
flashes of insight, yet nothing hangs together long enough to convince
by the final curtain. The cast work the patchy material well, but there
are no stand-out performances. Billy Boyd's Greig is removed too early
to make any impression as narrator, while the stop-start scenes prevent
the more promising storylines such as those of Abigail Davies'
autophagous Laura and Milton Lopes' mother-seeking Daniel from
developing any meaningful humanity. Meanwhile, Simon Vincenzi's
obstructive set of suitcases poses unresolvable problems in blocking as
well as for Chahine Yavroyan's lighting. A black hole of logic pervades
(and, irritatingly, no one uses the word 'mammy wagon' in Northern
Nigeria, as a character here does) while, most crucially, not a`single
character elicits sympathy ­ stabbing, overdose and emotional rejection
are cheap ways to provoke a reaction. The aim of writer and directors
is to leave the questions and answers with the audience, but in the
absence of discernable pointers it raises only questions. Such as
'why?' Nick Awde

Sarah-EllenDiverse Atractions - This solo play by Roy
Hyams presents the title character as a happy, fulfilled wife and
mother, contentedly awaiting the return home of her loving and
protective husband while pitying the troubled, lonely girl next door.
It takes very little insight to guess that all is not as it seems and
gradually a darker, unhappier truth about loneliness and self-delusion
is exposed. There are some nice subtleties and small twists in the
writing, as when the pity-laced telling of the neighbour's story
gradually and unconsciously becomes about herself. Those who are not a
step ahead of the play at every moment may find such revelations
surprising and all can find them touching. Self-directed, Alexandra
Bliss' performance too often leans away from subtlety toward broad
signifying and overplaying, handing everything to the audience and thus
undercutting their emotional involvement. Gerald Berkowitz

Schwartz It All About Pleasance Dome
- This compendium show salutes Broadway and Hollywood songwriter
Stephen Schwartz, best known for Godspell. Eschewing the usual
and-then-he-wrote format, Mark Powell and John Cusworth arrange the
songs in little dramas, usually involving a romantic situation that
goes right or wrong. This requires moving a lot of the songs out of
their natural context, and in some cases the
square-peg-now-in-round-hole shows. The attractive young cast sing and
act them with verve and humour, but the problem is that very few of the
songs are really memorable. Schwartz once famously complained that more
people knew that Bob Fosse directed Pippin than that he wrote it, and I
suspect more people will come away from this show remembering the
staging and performances than the songs. Gerald Berkowitz

The SeagullKingıs
Theatre - The major accomplishment of Peter Stein's first
foray into directing Chekhov in English is the clear vision of a stage
full of characters each believing themselves to be the heroes of their
own dramas, but each in their own way demonstrating the same qualities
and limitations. Like Masha, everyone is a little drunk with self-pity;
like Arkadina, egotistical; like Kostya, lovesick; like Dorn, cruel.
Unfortunately, however, this means that every actor is also in his or
her own play, too rarely acknowledging the others or even acting in the
same style; and the sense of ensemble so essential to Chekhov is
totally absent. From moment to moment some of their acting decisions
are impressive, but at least an equal number fall flat. And as a
result, a three and a half hour running time, long even for a
masterpiece, brings with it a heaviness, shapelessness and apparent
absence of directorial vision. Though she was born to play Nina, Fiona
Shaw finally comes to this play as Arkadina, clearly taking as her
keynote a passing mention of the fact that the family were lower-middle
class before her stardom. So, never far beneath the grande dame's
instinctive upstaging of everyone else is Arkadina the vulgar fishwife
braying, grasping and fighting for what she wants. Iain Glen carries
Trigorin's big scene, in which he goes from explaining the pains of the
writer's life to a cool announcement to her face of how he plans to
destroy Nina, and Michael Pennington conveys the complacent doctor's
disdainful cruelty well. Cillian Murphy invests Kostya with an
attractive boyishness in the early scenes but is less successful as the
character becomes haunted by thwarted love and ambition. Jodhi May can
only hint at either Nina's early freshness or later madness.
Gerald Berkowitz

7 Assilon PlaceC Venue - To address the topic
of asylum seekers through clowning is audacious, to say the least, but
Talia Theatre pull it off, luring us through unrealistic theatrical
means into the unreal world of refugees in a detention centre waiting
for word on their fate. The whole bag of non-representational styles is
employed, from choreographed and stylised movement through mime,
cartoon characterisations and symbolic set and costume elements. And,
amazingly, it works, as we come to understand the nightmare world of
three individualised characters learning a new language, coping with
incomprehensible and unending bureaucratic forms and, above all, living
a nightmare in which unseen (literally - they appear only as telephone
calls or disembodied voices) forces control their fate. My only
complaint is that as the piece progresses and its point-of-view becomes
more overt, the style becomes more conventional - clearly a directoral
decision, but one that reduces the theatrical energy just as the
emotional involvement is peaking. Gerald Berkowitz

Shakespeare for BreakfastC Venue - This Fringe
perennial is always an entertaining start to the day. This year's
version is Macbeth - the Panto, complete with Ugly Sister witches,
Principal Boy Macbeth, audience participation ('Behind you!' and the
like), lots of silly songs and bad jokes, and of course a happy ending.
In some ways it's a risky choice, because with an unresponsive audience
(or one that doesn't know the conventions of the form) it can fall
pretty flat. But if you go prepared to revert to childhood and enjoy
yourself, it can be a lot of fun. And they give you free coffee and
croissants. Gerald Berkowitz

ShamletC Central -
One of the funniest hours on the fringe, this comedy by Andrew Doyle is
a delightful mix of wit and absurdity. A group of actors assemble in
Stratford to do a fringe production of Macbeth, not knowing it's a
front for the producer's plan, inspired by Shakespeare's ghost, to rob
the poet's grave in search of lost plays. And so we get, piled one on
top of another, lots of backstage jokes involving dreadful auditions
and bitchy zingers among the luvies, lots of Shakespeare parody in the
rehearsals and plans for an all-singing all-dancing Macbeth, and lots
of earthy comedy as Anne Hathaway's ghost lays out her grievances
against her hubby. The cast are all first-rate, with special praise due
Harry Dickman's sly Shakespeare. Gerald Berkowitz

Sholom Aleichem - Now
You're Talking, Part 2C Venue -
In this latest instalment of the stories of Sholom Aleichem, Saul
Reichlin returns to Kasrilevke, the Jewish village in 19th century
Russia that gave us Tevye the Milkman and Fiddler on the Roof. Whereas
the tales in Now You're Talking! ­ Part 1 are filled with details that
focus the day to day life of the village, Part 2 shifts angle to allow
the personalities of the villagers themselves to entirely take centre
stage. This frees up Reichlin to delve into Sholom's characters to
create a more expansive, physical performance that complements the
multi-layered storytelling of the previous show. Painting great swashes
of this unique cultural life where even the lowliest is important
enough to have a story, Reichlin relates with glee each wily rabbi,
absent-minded estate agent and drunken shoemaker. Telegrams provide a
handy device to keep track of a runaway train inadvertently hijacked by
a villager trying to impress a visiting Christian priest. Sholom's own
voice appears as he somehow ends up knocking on doors at midnight to
get a body buried in return for eternal life. These are tales you never
want to end thanks to Reichlin's energy and humour. Roll on Part 3. Nick
Awde

Sixteen Types of Happiness Roman Eagle Lodge
- Big State Theatre Company offer a sweet little fable that, if it is
not quite as successful as they might wish, still provides a share of
laughs and sober thoughts and gives the performers some fun stuff to
do. The owner of a seaside bed-and-breakfast is depressed,
and decides that all the satisfied guests are stealing his happiness,
carting it away in their suitcases with the pilfered towels. We
ultimately learn the true cause of his unhappiness, which is a lot more
real, but before then we are treated to a cross-section of holidaying
Britons, from the never-satisfied to the easily-gratified, the
self-sufficient to the demanding, the honourable to the dishonest.
These, along with the owner and his ever-cheerful wife, are all played
by Mark Bishop and Julie Black without even the aid of costume changes,
and the only flaw in the piece is that it can't decide from minute to
minute whether it wants to be comic or serious, so the audience doesn't
know how to react and the potentially moving ending doesnıt quite
work. Gerald Berkowitz

SnipercultureTraverse - Masked
as an expose of the pop music business, Johny Brown's play for the
company called Underground Utopia tells us little that is new and much
that is unbelievable, while ineffectually reaching for emotional
resonances with a tacked-on allusion to Medea. An ageing country music
star falls for a fan in Greece, and the girl becomes a punk rock star
herself. Despite the fact that she is now the label's biggest
money-spinner, the company head decides to break them up, marry the guy
off to someone else just for the publicity, and destroy the punker's
career. Will love triumph over commerce? Will the female boss played
virtually as the Wicked Witch of the West ever get out of her chair?
Will we believe that either of the lovers is actually a singer? Will we
believe or care about any of this? A couple of days later, I've
forgotten the answer to the first question, but am quite certain about
the others. Gerald Berkowitz

The Snow Queen C Venue - Andersen's tale of
the evil spirit who captures a boy and freezes his heart, and of the
brave girl who travels to save him, is given a straight-forward and
only intermittently inventive staging by this young company. Some of
the cleverest conceits, like playing the flowers as a self-absorbed
society couple, would seem to go over the heads of most children in the
audience, as might the clever lyrics to a couple of original songs.
Lewis Barfoot is an attractive heroine, and could do much to carry the
show if she were directed to connect with the audience more. The fact
that the narration is delivered by a disembodied recorded voice is
probably an error, doing little to engage the children, and it is
noteworthy that the sequence in which an onstage crow tells a story is
one of the most successful in the play. In sum, parents may find more
to entertain them, and also be more able to follow the plot, than the
under-6s for whom the play is intended. Gerald Berkowitz

Something ElseC
too (reviewed at a previous Fringe) - Tall Stories Theatre
have adapted the picture book by Kathryn Cave and Chris Riddell into a
quietly pleasant one-hour play for children. The title character is a
strange beast shunned by all the other animals because he is different.
When he encounters a similarly lonely Something, his first instinct is
to reject it because it isn't exactly like him, but good sense wins out
and he discovers that they can be friends and play together even if
they aren't exactly alike. The three performers present the story with
unthreatening charm, punctuating the action with quiet songs. Sharon
Morwood's sweetly childlike Something Else is balanced by Angela
Laverick's more boisterous Something, while Toby Mitchell provides
genial narration. Some jokes, like giving a pair of rabbits a hip-hop
song, may be well over the heads of the audience, and in general the
piece may be a bit too understated. The under-fives in the audience
watched attentively but seemed engaged only by the most active
rushing-about scenes, and the subtle moral may have required an
after-show chat with mother to sink in. Gerald Berkowitz

Song and Dance Man Stage by Stage - The
title is not one most people would instinctively apply to Gustav
Mahler, but one thesis of Mike Maran's narrative-with-music is that the
composer was capable of both song and dance, and that much of his music
has a happier quality than is sometimes recognised. Maran begins with
his own Mahler connection, as a teenage member of the Edinburgh
Festival Chorus for the British premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony at
the 1965 Festival. He then imagines himself another young man, an
acolyte of the composer in a unique position to watch his life with
Alma and experience his music in that context. In this way, with six
musicians backing Maran's tale, excerpts are played to illustrate or
counterpoint events and emotions in the composer's life. Particularly
telling is the repeated trope of playing an exquisite piece of music
and then reading a contemporary review dismissing it as Jewish
sentimentality. It may be that Maran cheats a little in interpreting
the musical selections as more personal and programmatic than they
actually are, but the device works theatrically, and the rich beauty of
the music itself does much to carry the evening. Gerald
Berkowitz

Songs for a New WorldPleasance Dome
- Jason Robert Brown's musical plays like a collection of unrelated
songs pulled from his trunk rather than a structured musical or even
song cycle. There are hints that the composer had the rueful model of
Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along in mind, opening, as that show
does, with the optimistic anthem of young graduates and returning
repeatedly to that song in contrast to the more bittersweet or blackly
comic songs in between. But no such balance or counterpoint develops,
leaving merely a string of independent numbers, some of them quite
effective. A woman recalls how she repeatedly passed up opportunities
for happiness. An outsider wonders why he never gets a break. A man
realises love is both a glory and a trap. In a more comic mood, Mrs.
Santa complains about being left alone every Christmas, and a tipsy
wife can't get her husband to notice her suicide attempt. Like every
other theatre composer of the past thirty years, Brown cannot avoid
occasional melodic echoes of both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, though he
does have an attractive sound of his own. The young cast take turns
doing full justice to each of their solos, but the songs remain
separate, and the program has no cumulative effect. Gerald
Berkowitz

Southern DiscomfortGilded Balloon Teviot - Butch Hammett's solo
show offers what might be a generic autobiography of an ordinary guy
from the American South, juxtoposing scenes of him as an adult washing
dishes at a society dinner while dreaming of dating supermodels, with
memories of growing up. The memories and the personality they create
are familiar to the point of stereotype: going to summer camp, picking
up dodgy sexual information, hanging out with a self-indulgently
burned-out Vietnam vet, playing football in high school and falling for
a cheerleader, discovering that he's on the wrong side of a gap between
the rich and the poor, drinking and fighting in various bars, and the
like. Meanwhile, the adult's inclination to fantasize beyond his
potential merely adds another layer of old news. This is all very, very
well-trodden territory, and Hammett is unable to make it his own or
shape it into fresh or newly illuminating form. He is a personable
enough performer, however, and an hour in his company has some charm. Gerald
Berkowitz

Spoonface SteinbergUnderbelly
- Lee Hall's short play has become something of a modern standard, so I
may be in a minority in finding the monologue of an autistic child who
is dying of cancer more than a little manipulative and even in dubious
taste as the Holocaust is rather clumsily dragged in and platitudes
about the meaning of life and hope in the face of death are
presented as deep truths just because of the speaker's mental
limitation. That said, Emily Wright offers a sensitive portrayal of
Spoonface, going far to make both her naivete and preternatural wisdom
believable, and the device of including a live singer to illustrate the
girl's love of opera adds to the theatrical effectiveness. Gerald
Berkowitz

Squonk Opera -
BigsmorgasbordwunderwerkGilded Balloon Teviot - Bizarrely attired
individuals materialise from every corner and converge onstage. Musical
instruments appear in their hands and, as a giant cornucopia unfurls
itself from the wings, they burst into heavenly music. This is Squonk
Opera, and their latest work is a multi-format symphony of music and
movement that celebrates music and movement, laced with a suitably
decadent feel. A vague leitmotif of food links the sections ­ think
Grid Iron's Gargantua ­ but other concepts remain elusive. This US
company has done its homework and drawn from a wide range of mainly
European sources. The result is a visual and aural feast, almost epic,
that reels from style to style with pleasing logic. A snake dance of
hands behind a Venus de Milo turns to a strident barn dance with
illuminated tomtom. Drum'n'sax invokes a dance of three-headed monsters
straight out of Tremors, a huge organ machine appears like something
out of Mad Max, bass and bass bassoon duel like ships in the night.
Bouncing off Jackie Dempsey's keyboards, Jeffrey Beck's bass and Kevin
Kornicki's percussion, Steve O'Hearn's stunning synth horn threatens to
upstage the proceedings. Meanwhile singer Christina Honeycutt takes
centre stage like a cabaret Bjork. Behind all the pzazz, though, one
senses a certain aloofness from their audience outside of the usual
dance snobs, which is a pity. Nick Awde

Star StruckAssembly Rooms
- David Benson's new solo show is a salute to all his personal culture
heroes, the ones he'd like to invite to an ideal party. He runs through
the list, offering charming anecdotes about personal encounters with
Eric Morecambe and Quentin Crisp, and instant evocations of others
ranging from Fred Astaire to Groucho Marx, Judy Garland to Noel Coward.
Benson is a good mimic, but he is at his best when he doesn't attempt
direct imitation but goes rather for the essence of his subject. A few
bars sung in the Sinatra style or just the silent image of Garland
walking onstage, for example, capture them better than more extended
imitations later. The fuller impressions come in a fantasy sequence in
which he attends the party of his dreams, only to be sadly
disillusioned by the discovery of his idols' clay feet, thus giving the
hour an emotional core and an unobtrusive message that are nicely
satisfying. A little long and prone to lapses in pacing, both familiar
problems for Benson, the piece is carried ultimately by the performer's
unassuming but solid talent and great personal charm. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Story of FunkAssembly Rooms
- Pint-sized P-Funk Chainsaw bursts onto the stage and launches into a
motormouth monologue about all the lowlife challengers for his world
wrestling title. Later we meet his arch-rival and top slob Venezualan
Meat Sack plus a non-wrestling mate from NZ, John D Bankteller. Kiwi
comic Dai Henwood has rather more imaginary friends than, say, you or
I, and this evening he's introducing them to us. At first you rather
wish he wouldn't since he's evidently spent a long, long time in their
imaginary company ­ not necessarily a good thing for the sanity
department. And then something clicks and you're plunged into Henwood's
world, where the bemusment turns to chuckles turns to fullblooded belly
laughs. The logic-bending is effortless. Straight out of the hood,
P-Funk floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee and raps like Ice T.
The Meat Sack turns out to be not Venezualan at all but from the
Eastern Bloc, with dried fish hanging from his fighting togs but he's
more concerned about where to stick his sausage. Bankteller gets even
more laughs with his tales of smalltown derring-do while P-Funk returns
to re-enact his comeback fight in glorious gore. An oddly eighties
time-warp adds a bizarre tinge to an already surreal hour.
Nick Awde

The Straits Traverse - Gregory
Burke follows his remarkable debut play Gagarin Way with one that is
considerably less in-your-face brilliant but may have more enduring
depth. His subject is the 1982 Falklands War, but in the manner of
David Rabe's Vietnam plays, he observes it through the filter of the
experiences of those at home - or, in this case, in the British colony
at Gibralter, where Burke was a teenager at the time. A quartet of
teenagers excited by the war news confuse it with their own xenophobia,
so that in their minds fighting with local Spanish youths is somehow
doing their bit for the war effort. Deaths in battle and at home are
sobering reminders to us and to at least some of those onstage that
there is more to war than jingoistic flag-waving. That's
about the extent of the play - the rest, about the kids' ineractions,
is pretty standard stuff - but director John Tiffany and the actors of
Paines Plough make all the sad ironies resonate.
Gerald Berkowitz

That's LifeAugustine's
- The old morality plays justified Man's position on this mortal coil
in a world where everyone was considered Christian or heathen. For all
the dogma, they were intended to reassure and entertain. This musical
update smugly offers heavenly salvation in an increasingly heathen
world where most couldn't care less. It isn't reassuring and will only
entertain the already converted. Sermon over. A rock star dies but
can't enter heaven until someone's said a good word for him, and from
there play makes its worthy if undramatic way to a foregone conclusion.
As rock musicals go, Alan Moon's tunes in this original Canadian
production aren't half bad. John Illingworth's book is cartoon bubble
stuff, however, and one wishes for more songs and dance numbers. The
members of this young cast work hard with the material available. As
Knowledge, Maxine Marcellin is transfixing with the slowburner More
Than We Can Ever Know while one wishes Nadine Villasin as Good Deeds
was allowed to really let go on Hey, God. The four-piece band is tight,
with MD Jeanine Noyes on keyboards, and the arrangements are pleasingly
loose, but the fact that director Barbara Cotterchio-Milligan sits them
with backs to the audience is offputting. Now when are we going to get
an edifying Christian musical about more pertinent matters like
genocide? Nick Awde

ThebansAssembly Rooms - Liz Lochhead's
version of the epic of the House of Laius opens and closes with
straight-forward condensations of Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone, with
the middle and most original third compiled from Aeschylus and
Euripides. The whole is structured so that it can be played with nine
actors, the key performers of one scene donning masks to join the
Chorus in others. It is likely that most will find the central section
of greatest interest. Drawing on a version of the myth that has Jokasta
not dying at the end of the Oedipus play, Lochhead has her trying to
broker a peace between her warring sons before the fatal events that
open Antigone. This creates an opportunity for a strong expression of a
woman's view of war and of the absolute superiority of any kind of
peace, while the sons cannot see or hear beyond their own values of
honour and ambition. The first and last thirds, however, are little
more than Sophocles-lite, with the condensation and the occasional
clashing anachronism of language preventing much emotional
power. Peter Collins as Oedipus and Lucianne McEvoy as
Antigone are forced to race through their sections of the play, with
only Jennifer Black's Jokasta really able to register. Gerald
Berkowitz

ThickJongleurs
- The central character in Rick Bland's moving little comedy was
dropped on his head as a baby and is slow of thought and limited in
perception. Like Mark Twain's Huck Finn, though, he is a scrupulously
accurate reporter of what he sees, erring only in his innocent
misinterpretations, through which we are allowed to see the truth.
Thus, for example, a salesman who rips him off seems to him friendly
and helpful, while his alcoholic and nearly psychotic mother is, in his
eyes, loving and merely dependent on her medicine. The author shows
this innocence carrying him through small indignities and major family
tragedies, if not with equanimity then with a protective veil that
enables him to learn and grow a little without being damaged further.
With Tamara Bick and Ross Mullan each playing several characters around
him, frequently in broad comic terms, it is the author's own solidly
realistic and unironic portrait of the boy that anchors the play in a
somewhat sentimentalised but always convincing and moving reality.
Gerald Berkowitz

Think No Evil Of Us - My Life With Kenneth Williams Assembly (reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - David Benson's
salute to Kenneth Williams has three movements. It begins with the
familiar picture, loveable warts and all - Williams recites a comic
poem, answers a simple question with an endless dissertation on
philology, philosophy and church history, flirts outrageously with a
ditch digger and a butcherıs boy (with pointed references to mince
& tongue), and berates himself for wasting his talent on
trivia. It closes with the far less attractive side of the actor
bullying friends, rude to fans, self-absorbed, loud and vulgar. In
between, Benson takes the audacious risk of stepping out of character
and speaking in his own voice about himself. Starting with his very
tenuous connection to Williams (as a child he won a Jackanory contest
and the comedian read his entry on the radio), he tells a lengthy,
convoluted and alternately comic and embarrassingly personal story. We
realize only late in the process that this is a typical Williams
performance, and that Benson as Benson is actually closer to capturing
the essence of his subject than the bracketing scenes of Benson as
Williams. Gerald Berkowitz

Thin WallsAssembly Rooms
- In a series of 37 very brief scenes, Alice Eve Cohen evokes life in a
decaying New York apartment building over a decade. A handful of
characters form the core of the action: middle-class newlyweds who move
in, have a child and split up; working-class neighbours who face their
own crises; and a pair of ex-hippies who have become the building's
unofficial historians; along with a collection of residents and staff
ranging from the friendly through the crazy to the murderous. The
running theme is the paradox of a community that manages to work even
though each of its constituent units is dysfunctional, and of people
settling for less or sinking into reduced standards or expectations
without realising it. With less than a minute for many of her monologue
scenes Cohen is rarely able to create much in the way of
characterisation or reality, and her performance too rarely extends
beyond variation in accents or postures. The piece remains a sketch for
a play along the lines of Elmer Rice's Street Scene rather than a fully
developed work in itself. Gerald Berkowitz

This Lime Tree BowerAssembly Rooms
- Conor McPherson's early play is, like most of his others, built on a
string of monologues, here three interlocking ones by three very
different characters whose lives eventually come together - a randy
college lecturer, a shy teenager and his older brother. The three
actors (Nick Danan, Dermot Kerrigan and Peter Quinn) barely acknowledge
each other, taking turns with their frequently very funny shaggy dog
stories, until the brother takes vengeance on the local bookie by
robbing him and the three stories converge, improbably on their way to
a happy ending. Typically with McPherson there is barely any play here,
and it would work equally well on radio. But just as typically, the
three stories are good, and you enjoy an hour in the company of this
master tale-weaver. Gerald Berkowitz

Those Eyes, That Mouth Gridiron Theatre
- Gridiron is a company specializing in site-specific works, here a
residential building in Edinburgh in the midst of heavy redecoration.
They use the stripped-down rooms to tell a tale with echoes of The
Yellow Wallpaper and Pinter's Dwarfs, among others, of an artist so
immersed in her work that the outside world seems a ghostly intrusion.
As the necessarily small audience are led from one bare room to
another, Cait Davis as the artist wanders about the building in various
states of sanity - now relating to the outside world, now lost in
memories of the past, now inhabiting her closed reality. Singer-actor
David Paul Jones follows her around helping to sustain the eerie mood.
I must report that I was in a minority in not being moved or caught up
in the play or in finding the unconventional location a significant
contributor to what I thought might just as well have been done on a
stage. Gerald Berkowitz

Three Guys Naked From the
Waist DownGreyfriars Kirk House
- The 1980s Off-Broadway musical by Jerry Colker and Michael Rupert
might have seemed particularly appropriate to the Edinburgh Fringe,
dealing as it does with the lives of a trio of stand-up comics, but
this production from the National Student Theatre Company is unable to
make much of either the satiric story or the admittedly weak songs. A
typical stand-up comic (Edward Harrison), one with an angry-guy persona
(Richard Michael-Morse) and a weird Andy Kaufman type who may be a
genius or just unstable (Pete Howe) form a trio, become a hit, achieve
the comic's dream of a TV sitcom and cope or don't cope with selling
out. I'll leave you to guess which embraces demeaning success, which
kills himself and which returns to his stand-up roots, and just say
that the hard-working actors were unable to create much reality in
either their characters or the milieu. Gerald
Berkowitz

ThroatPleasance (reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - John-Paul Zaccanini is
a dancer/mime/aerialist/performance artist whose solo performance has a
number of striking moments, but doesn't add up to much. We first see
him in the guise of a drag queen kneading bread, only to have the dough
take on the shape of a babe-in-arms, sweetly betraying his unhappiness.
He watches trash TV, speaking along with the dialogue in several
languages. He attempts to flirt with every person in the audience. He
becomes a picky, demanding pop singer in rehearsal. He climbs a rope
for aerial ballets or splashes around in a pool of water, the ripple
effects projected on a screen. Some of it is lovely. If there is a
subject, it is loneliness, as he portrays the isolate, the social
inept, the wanker. Gerald Berkowitz

Tina C: Lifestyle Guru Pleasance - Tina C breaks away
from a sultry tantric pose, slips out of her sari and silkily informs
us that it's a session not a show. World issues like the Iraq war added
to a hectic year on the international circuit with hits like Other Guys
Love Parts of Me (But You Love My Whole) have finally made her realise
that she's been ignoring the ordinary people, people just like us. And
now, trained from feng shui to primal scream, Tina has so much love to
give and we're about to get it. After a spot of audience hugging and
swaying - something you'd never believe possible of a midweek Scottish
crowd - Tina launches into Let Me Be Your Lifestyle Guru, a mini-epic
that Celine would be proud to cover, bar, of course, the fact that
we're now officially in double entendre heaven. Reading out audience
questionnaires filled in earlier, she dispenses advice on matters as
diverse as alcoholism, golf widows and US foreign policy prompting
adorable swipes at, well, just about everything. The message
occasionally overreaches itself, such as the slightly baffling War,
where Tina sings War and We Are the World over I Love Rock 'n' Roll.
But deliciously dippy whatever. Nick Awde

Tittle TattleGilded Balloon Teviot
- In a bad piece of marketing, almost nothing alerted audiences to the
fact that TV writer Lesley Calre O'Neill had actually produced three
separate plays performed in rotation, all set in Yorkshire in 1959 and
all featuring such familiar TV soap actors as Marc Bannerman and Keira
Malik. In the first, Cross Your Heart and Hope To Die, a fortune teller
announces that someone in a woman's family will die soon, and as her
husband has already had one heart attack, soon everyone in the
neighbourhood is trying desperately to avoid foot-in-mouth faux pas or
making book on the side as to which day he'll choose to snuff it. The
second play, Irma Bullock, brings a femme fatale into the
neighbourhood, catching the eye of all the men and almost stealing the
lead in the community theatre musical from the wife of one of her
conquests. The situation established, much of the onstage humour comes
from familiar am-dram jokes of bad performances, missed cues and the
like. The Crakenhedge Flasher has the structure of classic farce, as a
relatively innocent slip must be covered with an ever-escalating series
of lies and stratagems. Here, a man examining a collector's quality gun
in a dark spot is mistaken by a passing matron for a flasher. Rather
than admit that he was making the illicit purchase, he begins a series
of lies that culminate in promising the appearance of a big pop star at
the church Christmas fete and then having to pass off an impostor.
Despite the seemingly foolproof structure, this is the weakest of the
trilogy, with the joke running out of steam quickly and the
interpolated gags involving lip-sync performances at the fete not
really scoring. In all three plays the acting is broad to the point of
caricature, with much of the fun for the audience - noticeably older
than the typical fringe audience - lying in seeing familiar TV faces in
a new context. Gerald Berkowitz

Titus
AndronicusGateway Theatre (reviewed
in London) - Titus Andronicus is
perhaps Shakespeare's least-often produced play, because its wave upon
wave of Grand Guignol horrors intimidates or defeats most conventional
companies. (Briefly, the Roman war hero finds himself the target of
vicious enemies: his sons are murdered, his daughter raped and
mutilated, he conned into mutilating himself and driven mad, until he
achieves a horrible vengeance.) But Shakespeare's phantasmagoria of
murder, rape, mutilation, madness and cannibalism proves fertile ground
for KAOS's signature mode of eclectic physicality. Under Xavier Leret's
direction, the cast of eight employ all the performance styles in the
company's repertoire, with such inventiveness and freedom that if there
are three people onstage at any point, it is likely that one will be
acting in an entirely different mode from the others.But this stylistic
eclecticism is not random or pointlessly showy. Shakespeare's play of
extreme atrocities and extreme revenges actually benefits from an
approach that does not shrink from its excesses, but rather underlines
them theatrically. A great deal of stage blood is spilled, but the
Grand Guignol approach is carefully controlled, and the company's
repertoire of styles is expanded to include moments of quiet naturalism
that movingly convey the central character's barely-imaginable depths
of pain and despair. Neither the play nor the performance style can be
for all tastes, and the squeamish are particularly advised to look
elsewhere for safer entertainment. But this is a rare opportunity to
see an inventive director and company addressing a classical text, and
finding theatrically effective ways of serving it.Gerald
Berkowitz

ToastC Central -
This very, very short one-hander, barely 15 minutes from start to end,
is nonetheless complete and very satisfying in its creation of a
reality and a character, even though (or perhaps because) both bear
little similarity to the reality we inhabit. Katy Slater plays a woman
who lives on a stepladder, having moved up in the world from sharing
accommodation in a suitcase and brief but in different ways
unsuccessful sojourns in an oven and a cushion. She describes her
various homes and also her neighbours above and below her on the
ladder. What makes it work is Slater's performance. With the sweet,
confident rationality one sometimes sees in the totally insane, she
offers an absolutely normal, matter-of-fact narration, giving no
indication whatever that the world she describes has anything unusual
about it. And so we are drawn into her reality, accepting it as
reasonable until the spell is broken by the end of the play. And by
then, something truthful has been said about the accommodations we make
to life and the ways we try to keep our sense of self through various
compromises. Gerald Berkowitz

Tonight We FlyGeorge Square Theatre
- Trestle is a company whose work I have always loved - a mask and mime
group with none of the preciousness that label might suggest, and with
the ability to individualise characters so that their full-head masks
almost seem to change expression. Fearing that their style was limited,
they have been experimenting with variations, as in this biography of
painter Marc Chagall, which adds puppetry and - for the first time in
my experience of them - an unmasked, speaking actor as the
artist. I am particularly unhappy to have to say that he is
the weakest thing in the show, and that it is the 'old' Trestle
elements of masked real-life characters and their painted equivalents
that most capture the spirit of Chagall's dreamlike paintings. Gerald
Berkowitz

Paul TonkinsonPleasance -
Paul Tonkinson is an interesting case. Discuss. He trots out the same
old mildly offensive jokes about her indoors, encountering resistance
in the bed department, regional stereotyping... well, you get the idea.
But so long as most of the nation's population finds it funny,
reflecting what goes on behind behind their lace curtains, there'll
always be a demand for an act like this. To his credit ­ and enduring
success ­ he updates and packages it well and brings the house down as
a result. In fact, Tonkinson is one of those natural comics who has the
gift of instant connection. If you wrote his act down you'd be pushed
to find a single punchline, it's all in his deadpan North Yorks tones
and rampant physicality as he takes a laidback run-through the Brits
(and Yorkshiremen) at their funniest and their worst. Steering clear of
the territory of the born-again stand-up with young kids, he takes you
David Attenborough-style through the Zeitgeist of parenthood before
moving on to burning testicles in chemistry at school and post-partum
conjugal rights. Thoroughly old school, discreetly end of pier and with
nary a hint of spreadsheet comedy, it all somehow makes sense. Nick
Awde

Topping and Butch:
Afternoon TeaseUnderbelly
- The duo of Michael Topping and Andrew Simmons put on an in-yer-face
front in their leather or rubber gear, but they're really lovely boys,
a slightly hipper and somewhat camper version of Kit and the Widow -
that is, witty songs from, in this case, an openly gay perspective. And
so we get a version of the 'You say potayto' song contrasting the
vocabularies of gay and straight men, a barbed salute to Robbie
Williams and passable impersonations of Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis
singing that condoms are a girl's best friend. There is perhaps too
much chatter and filler involving their assistants serving sherry in
this afternoon hour, leaving you wanting more of the songs than you
get, but it is, as the title suggests, just a teaser for their evening
show. Gerald Berkowitz

Touched by FireC Central
- One of the problems for those in the West seeking to probe the human
condition is that we've already had our inter-ethnic conflict, civil
wars and world conflagrations (well, hopefully, that is), so writing
about national injustice is a bit of a dead end. A scientist found dead
in woods or firebombing second-homers in Wales is as close as the
British get. Inspired by world events such as the Moscow theatre siege,
writer Ciaran McConville has come up with an intriguing response via a
mental institution. Inmates include a forlorn murderess (Barbara
Johnson), barmy physicist (George Varley), bubbly nurse (Luanna
Priestman) and a mysterious inmate (Daniel Weyman) who seems to know
their secrets. Who is the mystery stranger? What is it that binds them
all? Stranger-in-asylum has become a well-trodden sub-genre, but
between cliched onset and conclusion McConville veers into unexpected
territory. A confident storyteller, he interweaves stories to show the
chaos of a well-heeled society that reflects the insanity of the
asylum. The cast works hard and each shines equally, doubling parts
with skill. Unusually for the Fringe, McConville directs his own work
with objectivity to create a neat political parable with gentle humour
that prevents things from stumbling over their own importance. Nick
Awde

Trick BoxingGilded
Balloon Teviot - Two attractive American actor-dancers
combine their talents to good effect in this brightly comic
Depression-era tale with overtones of an Astaire-Rogers movie. Playing
virtually all the roles, Brian Sostek tells the familiar story of a
talented amateur plucked from the sidewalks and groomed to be a
prizefighter, with Megan McClellan as the temptress who, for possibly
nefarious motives, lures him away from his training. In true
Fred-and-Ginger fashion, the seduction takes place on the dance floor,
with the story allowing for three extended dance sequences. And the
couple take full advantage, burning up the small stage with fast-moving
and high-kicking Lindy-based action. In between, a variety of accents
and postures, and some tongue-in-cheek puppeteering, allow Sostek to
keep the story moving and invest it with fresh and infectious humour. A
slight piece at best, but one that delivers fully the bouncy and
light-hearted entertainment it promises. Gerald Berkowitz

12 Angry MenAssembly Rooms
- Reginald Rose's acclaimed teleplay, later a classic film, and even
later a stage play, proves its strength 50 years after it was written
in this powerful new production directed by Guy Masterson. The special
attraction of this particular version is that Masterson cast it almost
entirely with stand-up comics, in the faith that their stage instincts
would translate successfully to serious drama. And he was proven right,
as the tale of a jury in which one man resists the drive to a quick
guilty verdict and gradually wins the others over to his reasonable
doubt. is as well-acted and gripping as anyone could want. In the key
role played in the film by Henry Fonda, Owen O'Neill is perhaps just a
bit too self-effacing. But Stephen Frost as the hothead, Bill Bailey as
the methodical one, and Phil Nichol as the bigot - along with straight
actors Russell Hunter as the old man and David Calvitto as the baseball
fan - give flawless performances. Gerald Berkowitz

Twelfth PremiseC Central -
Three post-adolescent mates are emerging into the real world, their
days of teenage experimentation replaced by the realisation that now
they'll have to take responsibility for their adult actions. But what
seems at first to be the mawkish navel-gazing exercise so beloved of
visiting American companies swiftly turns into a hard-hitting
exploration of the newlytwentysomething condition. Aidan (Brian Crano)
fancies macho Con (Josh Cooke), who succumbs but enjoys telling his
shocked girlfriend the gory details. Surfer-bum Christian (Mathieu
Young) watches on with irritation before returning with a more balanced
view after travelling abroad. The fun is watching each new encounter or
rejection spiral out into other relationships and trying to
second-guess from which direction the emotional repercussions will
come. Lovers come and go, friendships are put to the test, and we learn
that the death of a parent is as much a rite of passage as losing one's
virginity. Director Aaron Mullen is faithful to Crano's script,
underpinned with Josh Cooke's soundtrack of moody guitar, and deftly
orchestrates the eight-strong cast, who respond with impressively
restrained performances. Terribly worthy but deliciously profane the
play avoids all the self-important pitfalls of similar works, producing
a moving, thoughtful and gently funny experience. Definitely one of the
(pleasant) surprises of the Fringe. Nick Awde

Twentieth Century Legends - The Lives, Loves and
Music of Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee Rocket at Apex Hotel
- This small-scale salute to the two singers combines biographical
sketches by Jack Jaffe, read by him and pianist Allan Mills, and
selected songs by Jaffe and Corliss Randall. Though the program notes
that no direct attempt will be made to impersonate either of the
subjects, Randall is wigged and made up to resemble Peggy Lee and does
have a good microphone technique and the same blues-based singing
style, so that her numbers do suggest the essence of Lee. Jack Jaffe,
on the other hand, has a thin, nasal voice that occasionally hits a
recognisable note, sometimes even the right one, and he makes no
attempt at all to approximate the sound, style or phrasing of Bing
Crosby. He frequently forgets to aim at his microphone, and has trouble
remembering lyrics, so that his half of the show does very little to
evoke Crosby. The narration puts an emphasis on scandal, like Crosby's
drinking and Lee's love affairs, and has nothing at all to say about
their singing, missing the opportunity to illuminate their influences
and innovations - in short, what made them legends. Gerald
Berkowitz

21 Dog Years: Doing Time @
amazon.comAssembly Rooms
- Poised somewhere between the muckraking of Michael Moore and the
anecdotal monologue of Spaulding Gray, Mike Daisey's account of his
three years working for the online bookseller is a low-key, quietly
comic dissection of American corporate culture and the dot-com madness
of the 1990s that is most effective when least assertive. Adopting the
same sort of ordinary-Joe persona as Moore, Daisey tells how he, a
liberal-arts graduate with no career prospects, was won over by the
recruit-speak of the Amazon trainers and the cult of founder Jeff
Bezos, only to discover that being a Customer Services Representative
meant fobbing off complaints with empty promises while being monitored
and graded on the number of calls and toilet breaks per hour. Learning
to play the game, he engineered a promotion to a totally meaningless
executive job before quitting to save his sanity, only to discover that
failing at Amazon meant he was highly desired by other mad dot-com
companies. Daisey's half-amused half-outraged rants against some of the
wilder dot-com absurdities are comic and telling, but it may be the
quieter moments, as when he realises the toll his job is taking on his
soul, that resonate most. Gerald Berkowitz

Under Milk WoodSt George's West Church
- To tie in with the 50th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death, Guy
Masterson's near authoritative version of the poet's proto-soap opera
has been given a revamp, most notably the addition of specially
composed music by Matt Clifford. And so that other Coronation Street
more than repays another visit. Though Clifford's contribution mainly
takes the form of journeyman chord progressions for strings, the mere
fact of its presence is key to this production, since it opens up new
dimensions to the piece. There is a significant effect on pace,
breaking the action into discrete sections while maintaining the flow.
This altered structure enables Masterson to frame his characters with
almost camera-like focus, while also giving pause to redirect his
energies ­ rarely has a one-man show of this duration and without an
interval seemed so effortless. The old favourites glow with renewed
vigour ­ Blind Captain Cat, Organ Morgan, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
terrorising her departed husbands ­ 'And before you let the sun in,
mind it wipes its shoes!' ­ and the children's manic kiss or pay games.
Thanks to the combined vision of Thomas and Masterson, you'll be made
to feel completely at home in Llareggub. Nick Awde

The Usual SuspectsRoman Eagle Lodge
- This stage version of the hit who-did-what-to-whom film adds nothing
to the cinema experience while introducing staging and acting flaws
that make it considerably less effective than the original. The story
of a group of petty crooks brought together by a master criminal for a
disastrous project, and of the one survivor's account which may not be
fully accurate, depends on our believing everything that we see and are
told, until it is all called into question at the end. But
Ricardo Pinto's adaptation and direction leave most of the characters
undeveloped and much of the action unclear. The red herring character
of the chief suspect, for example, is insufficiently distinguished from
the others to stand out, and the several action sequences are so
clumsily staged that one needs a mental reference to the film to know
what is supposed to be happening. The two biggest and most
important roles, of the testifying survivor and his interrogator, are
played respectively by Pinto, who has a thick accent, and Kyle Phillip,
who is prone to inaudible mumbling, meaning that whole chunks of
essential exposition are lost. And the key sequence involving a notice
board, in which the truth is finally revealed, is here played with
slide projections, but with Phillip standing directly in front of the
screen, blocking the audience's view of the essential clues.
Rent the video. Gerald Berkowitz

The
Vegemite TalesPleasance Dome (reviewed
in London) - Imagine a TV sitcom
modelled on Friends, with the gimmick that all the flatmates and
neighbours are Australian 20-somethings living in London, and youıll
have some of the flavour of Melanie Tait's audience-pleasing but slight
comedy. In strict TV mode the characters are an unlikely mix of
recognizable types - the stud, the shnook, the perky tomboy, the
motherly one, etc - along with (for no reason except that Tait once
knew such a person) an Italian fascinated by obscenities in different
languages. In strict TV mode little actually happens, with token
gestures toward plot - an unwanted pregnancy, a tentative romance, a
decision to go home - merely providing the slimmest of skeletons on
which individual scenes or jokes about job-hunting, flatmate discord,
partying and culture clashes are hung. And much as in a sitcom, several
of the characters are underwritten and underused, although you can
imagine them playing more central roles in another episode. By the
undemanding standards of the genre, the play is not bad at all.
Certainly an almost entirely young and largely Aussie audience finds a
lot to recognize and enjoy in the flatmates' adventures, while the
device of punctuating scenes with to-the-camera monologues in which
each in turn list their most and least favourite things about London
repeatedly strikes comic paydirt. It's all a little too shapeless, even
by its own modest standards, but a harmless couple of hours that
provides its intended audience with a moderate quota of laughs.Gerald Berkowitz

VengeancePleasance - In the course of
Wayne Buchanan's play for the Kushite Theatre, two characters are
separately knocked out, tied up, threatened with violence, and then
just quietly untied and released . And that is emblematic of the play
as a whole, which repeatedly invokes tension and threat, only to let it
repeatedly dissipate anticlimactically. A young black couple have some
sexual and compatibility problems but seem in a stable enough
relationship until the man's brother returns from prison and
immediately begins undermining it. Flirtation with the perhaps
oversensitive woman escalates to the threat of rape, while lies to his
brother raise questions of her fidelity. At various times several
possible motives are offered for the interloper's actions but most of
them either disappear, are explained away as misunderstandings, or just
fail to pay off as revelations. With no clear explanation of any of the
characters' actions, no clear through-line for the plot and no
satisfying discoveries at the end, the cast has difficulty holding the
audience's attention or involvement. Gerald Berkowitz

A Very Naughty BoyPleasance -
Graham Chapman, the tall, military-looking member of Monty Python, was
an embarrassed homosexual and an alcoholic who was sometimes barely
able to function, and yet something about him made his colleagues
loyal, particularly John Cleese, who was his writing partner on various
projects for almost thirty years. Adrian Poynton's play tells Chapman's
story with remarkable sympathy, not just for his pain, but for Cleese's
after-the-fact guilt at never really thinking of Chapman as a friend.
The author plays Chapman and Tom Price Cleese, neither attempting a
direct imitation, but capturing a recognisable essence of each, and the
script evokes the Python style, so that, for example, Chapman's
entrance interview at Oxford plays as a variant on the rent-an-argument
sketch. Those who come for light entertainment will get it, but also
some sobering insights into both characters. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Water EngineAssembly Rooms
- David Mamet's 1976 play centres on the American urban myth of the
fuelless engine suppressed by the automobile and oil companies, but to
extend its scope to a general dissection of the dark side of the
American Dream Mamet also brings in the insistantly optimistic Worlds
Fair held in the middle of the Depression, a chain letter promising
riches and threatening doom, and the Lindburgh baby kidnapping. He also
multiplies reality levels by placing part of the action in a radio play
complete with scripts and sound effects. The result is something of a
jumble, and New York's 78th Street Theatre Lab have not been able to
master its difficulties or avoid adding obfuscating problems of their
own. Though most of the cast are required to play multiple roles and to
move between the play's various realities, the acting rarely rises
above the level of earnest amateurs, and Eric Nightengale's direction
is cluttered and poorly paced. As a result, what is at best a difficult
play is too infrequently coherent. Gerald Berkowitz

Western C Cubed -
Ben Woolf's four-hander is a clever twist on the innocent abroad theme,
with his hero a disgraced 19th century English dandy come to America
for a new start and quickly taken in by a series of canny Americans,
from cowboys to Indians. The running joke is that this naif completely
misinterprets everything and everyone, and thus gets deeper and deeper
into a convoluted land-grab scheme. The author and three other actors
take turns playing the hapless hero and everyone else, frequently
switching roles in mid-sentence, making for a fast-moving and very
inventive hour. Gerald Berkowitz

The Whale: A One-Man Moby
DickAssembly Rooms
- Moby Dick gets the one-man treatment in this version of Herman
Melville's classic 1850 tale of Captain Ahab's epic hunt for the great
white whale. Visually arresting thanks to Carlo Adinolfi's infectious
physicality, it nevertheless threatens to sink itself thanks to
relentless delivery that obscures meaning and characters. Adinolfi
roves the small stage, brandishing harpoons, hauling sails, perching
atop focs'ls, creating huge waves of action on which ride Melville's
words. The dialogue is split mainly between Ishmael, a sailor aboard
the whaler who philosophically charts his captain's obsession with
killing Moby Dick, and Ahab himself, who easily gets the best scenes.
Unexpected props add to the atmosphere: a model ship spawns two smaller
rowboats which in turn are rendered life-sized by a flexed wooden spine
with ribs that becomes the diving whale with the addition of a
sailcloth. A pleasing eye for technical detail evokes the novel but the
poetry of it all founders in superficial swells of drama. Adinolfi
earns his ten out of ten for effort but credit also goes to the edgy
lighting, FX and David Pinkard's rolling music for evoking Ahab's
nightmare. Nick Awde

The Whore's TaleUnderbelly
- Reclining, writhing and dancing on a heart-shaped bed, a proud and
happy whore declares herself to be the spirit of prostitutes since the
oldest profession's beginnings, and takes us through its stages and her
manifestations, from tribal holy woman, through vestal non-virgin and
Magdelaine, to Nell Gwynn wannabe and contemporary streetwalker. Except
for the last portrait, which offers some hint of deprivation and
desperation, the portraits are all proud and assertive, romanticising
whoredom as a celebration of female power and self-definition. In
keeping with this message, writer-actor Catherine Kirk eschews any hint
of subtlety in her acting, varying only the styles of broad
performance, from the children's TV storyteller of the tribal fable to
the in-your-face daring of the modern figure. This relentless one-note
quality loses its effectiveness after a while, allowing audiences to
notice how one-sided the history lesson is. Gerald Berkowitz

The Wicker WomanPleasance
- Population:3's show is a fast-moving anything-for-a-laugh romp that
delivers almost as much fun as it hopes to, and certainly enough for a
satisfying hour. Doubling and redoubling roles, the cast of three tell
a consciously silly story that is a variant on the cult horror movie
The Wicker Man with, in this case, a woman PC kidnapped by Scottish
islanders and sacrificed to propitiate the wind gods and save the local
windmill farm. But the fun lies in the openly cheesy jokes and comic
effects. All the characters, from the innocent copette to the local
yokels, are cartoons, and all sets, props and costumes comically
inadequate or exaggerated. Sound effects and even musical
bridges are all done by mouth. The cast member providing an echo effect
can't catch what the caller says and has to fake it. One of the women
puts on a fake moustache to play a man, and the comment that she looks
like Freddy Mercury triggers a string of impressions. Such silliness is
infectious, and while even more would be even better, few could
complain that there is not enough. Gerald Berkowitz

Wide AwakeGreyfriars Kirk House
- Melanie Challenger's new play addresses a fairly arcane subject that
may mean more to the author than to her audiences. Two female soldiers
alone in the woods on a field exercise begin displaying erratic
behaviour, some of which is explained by the fact that they are testing
a new drug that does away with the need for sleep, and have been up for
months. The author's point is that sleep deprivation does strange
things to you, and as the plot eventually shows that almost everything
we've been told up to that point has been delusion, the play eventually
makes its point. But, despite earnest performances by Tamsyn Challenger
and Brigitte Jarvis, the issue never really comes alive or seems as
important as it evidently is to the playwright . Gerald
Berkowitz

Wishbone: InterferencePleasance -
June 5, 1972. West Berlin. A partitioned city amputated from its nation
West Germany, itself sliced up by waves of inhumane terrorist attacks.
An American woman, Frances, arrives in search of her brother. Driven by
dreams and a pervading sixth sense, she fears for his safety and
contacts Bruno, a photographer with something to hide and who knew her
brother. They end up in the Cabaret Charlie, where things take a
surreal turn and the answers to all Frances' questions are revealed.
Building on the deserved success of Scapegoat, Wishbone have created a
sort of Twin Peaks meets Funeral in Berlin with this darker, more
sophisticated piece that wouldn't be out of place in the International
Festival. Devised and performed by Karen Glossop and Paul Murray, at
first the action takes place in three compartments to create a
split-screen narrative, the protagonists then moving out to physically
meet where the action remains cinema-style as cuts, crossfades and
reaction shots. An eerie soundtrack keeps the atmosphere neatly edgy.
Unsettling as it is beautiful, this is abstract theatre true to its
mission without sight of the audience while the technical inventiveness
used to realise this vision without a mega-budget is simply
extraordinary. Nick Awde

Withering LooksPleasance. - This is the show
that the duo of Lip Service began with, and the revival is always
welcome. Maggie Fox (the tall one, given to baleful looks) and Sue
Riding (the cheery short one) impersonate two earnest amateurs offering
an illustrated talk on the lives and loves of the Bronte sisters. Of
course, the fact that there are only two of them means that Anne must
be imagined to be off tramping across the moors, but they soldier on,
and the skilled professionals pretending to be over-reaching amateurs
are uninteruptedly hilarious, whether they're confusing the arrival of
a neighbour with the plot of Jane Eyre, or melding the book and film
versions of Wuthering Heights.You don't have to be a Bronte scholar to
enjoy this, though I suspect there are enough in-jokes to keep them as
happy as the rest of us. Gerald Berkowitz

The Woman Who Dances with
the WolvesThe Garage
- The Indo-Japanese dancer and choreographer Shakti offers this salute
to the power of woman as part of a repertory season in Edinburgh.
Drawing on Indian, southeast Asian and Japanese dance vocabularies, and
with an impressive music score that alludes to those cultures along
with Western symphonic and church music, and even the sampling of
spoken voices, the dancer holds the stage with an evocative and
frequently beautiful celebration of the female essence. A strong
dancing actress as well as a fluid mover, she takes us through the
varieties of the female experience, with an emphasis on the
positive. Her self-created dance is an impressive
celebration of both sexuality and strength, presented alternately or in
combination, as in a sequence in which her face and hands display
kittenish flirtation while her feet stamp with powerful authority.
Except for one mournfully toned section in which a regal train evolves
into a shroud, the spirit is affirmative throughout, leading to a final
image of proud but not aloof womanhood fully in tune with the universe.
Gerald Berkowitz

Jason Wood Gets His Hits Out For The LadsPleasance -
Armed with more teeth than any three sharks, a suit about as shiny as
their skins, a microphone set at nerve-damage level, and a
determination to out-camp Craig Hill or Julian Clary, Jason Wood could
be more than a bit intimidating were he not obviously so puppy-dog
eager to please. Even the obligatory humiliate-a-member-of-the-audience
segments are cushioned by the kind of local-amateur-night charm that
grannies find irresistible. A structural premise of describing what it
was like to grow up gay is dropped after a couple of home movie
snippets, and the act then becomes alternating bits of broad camp,
audience interaction and short singing imitations of B-list performers
like Jimmy Somerville and Tony Hadley, the comedian thoughtfully
telling us in advance who each impression is meant to sound like. There
is not a whole lot that is actually funny, and your appreciation of
Wood depends entirely on your empathy with his brand of personal charm.
Gerald Berkowitz